Recently, I have been working on some projects about the Internet of Things. Realizing that the Internet of Things is the trend of The Times, I plan to write a column about the Internet of Things to introduce my current work. I will lead you step by step to build an Internet of Things platform. Since it is the Internet of things, of course some hardware technologies will be involved. I will introduce this in the simplest way. I’ve written a kettle technology column before, but there are some advanced features of kettle that I haven’t covered yet, and I’ll continue to update them. When writing a column on the Internet of Things, I will combine the Internet of Things technology with kettle technology to create our own Internet of Things platform.

What is Internet of Things?

I’m not going to copy concepts from books, because they’re hard to understand, but I’m just going to explain my own understanding. The Internet of Things is the Internet of everything, and this thing can be understood as anything, that is, the materialist thing mentioned by Marx. It’s about connecting everything online. So how can things be connected through the Internet? For example, a rock, how do you connect to the Internet? Obviously, it’s impossible. The most obvious features of stone are hardness, weight and shape (diamonds are certainly different from granite). The Internet of Things connects the features of the stone, not the stone itself. So how do you know these characteristic data? You can’t just do an experiment on each rock and get the experimental data. That requires special equipment to get the data. These devices are called sensors. These sensors upload the collected data to the application server over a specific protocol (if HTTP is used, the interface provided by the server can be called directly). The so-called Internet of everything is actually the Internet of sensors. As shown below: All food, clothing, housing and transportation network.

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What is the Internet of Things platform?

The Internet of Things is actually the interconnection of sensors. What is the Internet of Things platform? It is a comprehensive service integration platform for managing sensors and processing data uploaded by sensors. For example, the popular smart farm is actually uploading the growth status data of crops and the environmental data of crops (temperature and humidity) to the smart farm platform for management, and distributing the data to APPS, websites, small programs and other terminal devices through the Internet. In fact, self-driving technology is also a kind of Internet of Things technology. The frequent accidents of Tesla are nothing more than the inaccurate data analysis of Tesla’s Internet of Things platform and the wrong instructions, resulting in misjudgment. In short, the iot platform is a sensor data collection and data processing system. The thingsBoard is an open source Internet of Things platform.

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How to build the Iot platform?

Building an Internet of Things platform is difficult for individuals and expensive for enterprises. There is a saying that standing on the shoulders of giants can see further. Thingsboard is an excellent open source iot platform. The key is open source, of course, this is written by foreigners, code style and domestic or there are many differences. If you want to use it in the actual production environment, you need to do a lot of modification. If you have the energy and cost, you can design an Internet of Things platform by yourself. You should consider communication protocol, data storage and data processing, and focus on the solution when the amount of data is too large.

Below is the Microservices architecture of ThingsBoard.

Conclusion:

This article mainly introduces what is the Internet of Things, what is the Internet of Things platform, how to build the Internet of Things platform. Only from the subjective cognitive aspects of the introduction, I hope you can be interested in the Internet of things. In-depth knowledge of the Internet of Things will be explained in practical projects. In the next article, I will introduce the power monitoring Internet of Things platform I am currently developing.