IOT & Control

IOT (Internet of Things) – Basically IOT is what it sounds like.

“Internet of, or inside of things like your refrigerator or maybe your hot tub .

It is a fairly recent computer technology term where the product manufacturers can  put sensors and other devices in our everyday things to allow these devices to pass information to other devices back and forth using the Internet to make our home or work lives easier.

One simple example would be that perhaps you may get a text or email message on your smart phone from your refrigerator telling you that you are low on tomatoes, grey poupon mustard and Bud lite beer.

To some, this is a great idea and to others it is not only extravagance but perhaps too much of your personal information going out on the internet.

Of course IOT will be in our self driving cars and pretty well any robotic type of device.

Some say it that IOT is the 3rd wave of the Internet where the first wave saw us access the internet only using our desktop computers and then the second wave saw us using more devices like our smart phones and now our refridgerator being able to call our cell phone is called the 3rd wave.

Some believe that the 4th wave is where we will have computer chips in our bodies which can connect to some medical computer and tell us when we need to have our heart checked and this will be a technology that can be called IOE or Internet of Everything..

This is where a relatively new term also comes into play called embodied cognition and this gets into the whole topic of mixing the brain and artificial intelligence and what is called Super AI …and well….it gets complicated.

This is where the mathematics geniuses start to talk about data science and big data and predictive analytics and the meaning of life itself.

Now the idea of having things controlled by the internet is not totally new but it is new to the consumer who is now able to buy products with IOT as a feature.

We used to have things in computers for decades called embedded systems.

Embedded systems are basically simple devices with hardware and software which are designed to do one or a few simple computer related things within another device. They could be television remote controls or be inside of a medical device or a kitchen stove. They will have a microcontroller and some means for i/o and a few other parts but no operating system or way to get programmed easily.

Many say that the study of embedded systems is making a comeback and that is good because it teaches designers to apply the knowledge from several disciplines like electrical and computer engineering and computer science in embedded platforms found in everyday things.

Now technically embedded systems can be defined as “the underlying intelligence behind smart electronic devices and the IOT.”

Many consider embedded devices to be a target for hackers.

In terms of security there are considered to be 3 types of attacks possible on connected objects and embedded systems. Software attacks and noninvasive hardware attacks and invasive hardware attacks.

A great place to get open source code and information about IOT is ThingsBoard https://thingsboard.io