Internet of Things (IOT)

Our company provides consultancy service to program, or build hardware around IOT (Internet of Things) as per customer needs.

IOT (Internet of Things) is not that new

While IOT, the Internet of Things is the new buzzword in town, for us at Neoteric Digital, IOT is nothing more than business as usual. Let us examine why:

IOT means we have some device or sensor (like temperature, humidity, door position etc), communicating with another device (like cloud server, local database, a master console etc.) via some standard communication channel like RFID, Wifi, Bluetooth etc. Thats it! And that is just what we have been for more than a decade now. We have been getting these toys (devices and sensor) to talk to other toys using microcontrollers. Just that now someone has given it a name: Internet of Things, it all appears very big and important.

Having said that, we surely are experts at IOT because of the vast kind of devices that we have built for some customer or the other, from Wifi based door sensors to RF based communication systems. We have done it all in some form or the other.

The IOT (Internet of Things) challenge

To the untrained eye, it seems simple enough to put a microcontroller, a wifi enabled device like Esp8266, throw in some AT commands and your IOT application is ready. But the reality is far from this. In real life projects battery power, form factor, installation, repair and replacement, reprogramming in field, broken network, RF interference etc. are important considerations for your product to be successful.

Most engineers confuse prototype from product. Getting two device to exchange information is simple enough. The difficulty is to do that consistently with a minimum of 1 year battery life is a different ball game altogether. The battery challenge is perhaps just one in the many of the obstacles that an IOT engineer needs to keep in mind when thinking of production level design.

We have been there, done that. Because of our vast experience, most problems that IOT engineers encounter, we already have encountered and have solved and have field experience of the same.