IoT Devices

Welcome to our first course on Internet of Things! You will become familiar with the course and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required to navigate the course. In this week you'll see that The Internet of Things is amazing, but it's not like it's some completely new thing. The amazing devices and technologies being are made up of systems, protocols, and architectures that have been around for decades. So in order to understand IoT, it's important to understand some key pieces of the Internet. As an optional "honors" activity (which we strongly recommend doing) we'll also get you started on the lab project - the best way to get your hands on things. In this practical lab we will guide you to gain experience with Internet of Things devices. You will do this by implementing a 2019 Honda Civic. In particular, you will be implementing a vehicular network and computation infrastructure comparable to that in the 2019 Honda Civic. Your infrastructure will perform real-time communications within the automobile to perform life-saving features such as obstacle avoidance and lane departure mitigation. Doing this will give you strong experience in programming IoT components, as well as teach you about vehicular networks, an emerging powerful use case for IoT.

In this week we will describe the foundational notions of electricity and IoT circuits you will need to build real IoT devices. We will start off by describing what electricity is and how it flows through electronics. We will present what electronic components are out there, how to choose the set you need for your target system, and how to construct the circuitry between them to build the logic underlying your device.

In computing, we have the concept of architecture as well. You don't just design computing systems. In this module, you will learn about how IoT systems are architected. We will start off by describing the higher-level components used to build IoT systems such as ICs and breakout modules. We will present computational platforms used in constructing real IoT devices, typical components used therein, and alternative designs used to connect them together.