The prupose of this presentation is to introduce you Internet of things.
IoT is a coming revolution, I want to invite you to join, showing you
it can be simple, cheap and fun !
I want to introduce you a funny & seasonal object made to take a picture of Santa Claus when he will come to your house. This gadget is really viral because no-one has already taken a Santa-Claus picture and because every one have a dream to make the buzz with a such photo.
Once taken, the picture can be displayed on Facebook where all you friends will become jalous. That's why they will rush to store to buy this object and then be part of the SantaClaus adventure.
To make this real, we first need to have a living room with christmas tree and so on... Here is mine ! ... I'm kidding ... You need a fireplace as all of us know Santa Claus is prefering that way.
Now we need to equipe this room. We are going to track the red guy using an exising IR sensor communicating over RF433, already in place.
Next, we will build a special sensor to put in from of the fireplace to detect any body cuting the IR/Lazer barier. This system will also use a RF433 Module to communicate with the main platform.
This third system is the most important one, receiving the sensor information, it will shoot the picture then transmit it over Internet using wifi.
To create the fireplace sensor, I chose to use an Arduino platform because it is really cost effective (here < 10 €) easy to design, working a long time on battery.
To a standard YABBAS platform, I just added a RF433 emitter and some (fake) led for detection. Internet have a lot of available resources to quickly make all of this working together.
The central system is based on a different embedded device. I prefered to use a Raspeberry PI system because we need Internet connectivity and webcam compatiblity to take the picture. Thanks to the 1GHz cpu and the Linux operating system it became really easy to develop the system using all what is already provided by Linux in terms of drivers and software. The missing part is the RF433 receiving system. For it, I create the prototype you have seen.
This is to show you that even if Raspberry is a complex system, it's easy to create a home made extension over it.
Before being able to sell this system, the prototype must be industrialized. A PCB is needed. This part was by the past one of the most expensive and complex. Nowdays things have turned and free software like Kicad gives you a professional tool to make your PCB.
To order them you can go online and get 10 of them for less than 100€ in a couple of days.
Once built the system is like a profesionnal one !
Let's back to how it's work : one the picture taken, it have to be reported to a backend system. One of the best communication protocol to manage IoT connectivity is MqTT. I do not have time to detail here, but if you want to make this kind of systems, take a look at it !
Now, let's have a look to backend.
Backend for IoT means Big Data ! It's true because in this case we expect to sell the product to everyone in France. We are about 25M house and as Santa Claus will visit all of them in less than 12 hours it means the system will receive about 600 picture / second.
This is a hudge flow we have to process because we do not only have to push picture on facebook, we also have to analyse the picture to ensure we do not push on people wall some picture like this : ...
Now the most important part if coming ! If you think we have described all around the product, you have missed what is the most important in the IoT : the business model.
In my point of view, IoT business model is based on creation of new data coming from the crowd.
Here is what the system has been built for : beeing able to track the exact road of Santa Claus. What for ? It's easy : how much do you think toy saler companies will be ready to pay to get fournitures from Santa Claus magic sack instead of paying them from the Chinese factories !
I assume millions !
Now, to finish, I have 3 messages to summurize :
Message 1 : #IoT is easy !
Message 2 : #IoT does not requiere a lot of stuff !
Message 3 : #IoT ... sometime you could be lucky !
Introduction to Internet of Things
By disk91
Introduction to Internet of Things
