Question

Discuss IoT implications on consumer and enterprise use cases?

Answer 1

Internet of Things (IoT): The physical objects embedded with sensors, hardware devices, software and communicate with each other and updates information on the cloud.

IoT in laymen terms:

Scenario 1: You are sitting in a room. The fans are turned on. You feel the weather is too cold, so you are manually adjusting the speed of the fan. Suddenly, your friend came to your house. You went outside along with him and you forgot to turn off the fans.

Scenario 2: You are sitting in a room. The fans are turned on. You feel the weather is too cold, the sensors automatically sense the weather condition and automatically adjusts the speed of the fan. Suddenly, your friend came to your house. You went outside along with him and your fans are automatically turned off since the sensor senses that there is no person sitting in the room.

This is called IoT.

- IoT stands for Internet of Things.

- Things can be physical things, environment, vehicles, devices, appliances, body wearables, traffic lights, water meter etc.,

- IoT senses the event(s).

- It transmits sensed information.

- It accepts commands for taking an action.

- It performs an action according to the received commands and the sensed information.

- It uses the internet for communication with other things or objects.

Let us understand one case study.

John is employed as a Streetlight operator. The main goal of his job is to turn on the street lights in the evening and turn it off in the morning. The other main responsibility of his job is to maintain the street lights. He needs to make sure that defective lights should be replaced on a prior basis. He often forgets to turn off the street lights in the morning. Sometimes he forgets to turn on the street lights in the evening. He is also facing difficulty in identifying the defected lights.

Can you list issues identified from the case study?

- Wastage of electricity if he forgets to turn off the light in the morning

- Safety issues to people

- Difficult to identify defected lights and maintain

- Wastage of electricity if no one is either using the road to commute or travel

To solve all those issues, the project "IoT based Smart Street Light System" would be helpful.

- It works using sensors, microcontrollers, and the internet.

- The functionality is simple, if there is the presence of the object in the road, lights will turn on.

- Based on the lightness of day or night, the lights will automatically turn on or off. Example: During the rainy season, at 4 PM itself it have been dark, then based on the light measuring sensors, the street lights would be turned on.  

- The defected lights can be identified and updated in the cloud.

How can it be implemented?

The prototype of this can be implemented using Arduino Microcontrollers, Sensors, ESP8266, ThingSpeak API.

Arduino comes in varies ranges like Uno, Mega etc. This microcontroller acts as a small computer wherein sensors, WiFi modules are embedded.

There are different sensors used for detecting lighting capacity, movements etc.

Light Sensor used to detect the lighting capacity and based on the given criteria, the light can be turned on or off.

Motion Sensor used to detect any movements.

The WiFi module ESP8266 transmits sensor data over the internet.

ThingSpeak API is a website which allows real-time data transmission of the sensor at regular intervals.

It is the need of the hour that most of the things should be converted to 'smart' using cutting-edge IoT concepts and techniques. Understanding AI and its subset will shape up the future.