Robot was built and we were wandering around home thinking what challange could be next to get more familiar with IoT and how to use RaspberryPI.

I have watched several webinars about usage of IoT and technologies around that. The most interesting was the one about technologies used in Azure Cloud lead by chmurowisko.pl. For me it was quite new approach as I thought about IoT only as smart gadgets used for smarthome. Pawel Fiderek showed during his presentations that IoT should be understand broader as for example:

• technology used as aid in chocolate factory while producing chocolates (little IoT devices could be used to check quality of produced chocolates). This approach I have learned while my studies – the idea was using image recognition to count number of raisins on sweet cakes
• technology used as aid for agriculture – set of humidity sensors used for irrigation on fields
• technology used in pigpens for recognition of pigs emotions (it is said that from happy pig you can have more tasty meat;))

What was also very interesting for me that the main challenge in IoT could be integration of different protocols used for sending data retrieved from different sensors. Key issue was also asking the right questions while meetings with customers and avoiding thinking about the solution – rather trying to understand well the problem and then from lots of different possibilities choose the right one. It is very similar to methods used in Design Thinking:

However for me the most interesting spot was this webinar:

This obvious usage of IoT, saving lives, was tremendous. The device wasn’t super visible, rather unnoticeable under this man’s shirt, but with data received from his glucometer and a connected insulin pump was great help for diabetics. As in my family I have some family members with this disease it was my first idea, that they should use exactly this appliance of IoT. It could be good if such a device exists also for people with asthma or any other chronic diseases. This webinar shown usage of MsAzure IoT and for me, for private use it is still too expensive technology.

As our next project has evolved into concept of „SmartHome” including this components:
– steering of color bulbs in 2 rooms
– steering of color led strip on the book shelf- steering of electrical socket
– automatically watered plants aka smart garden;)
– steering of air conditioning
– automatically opened windows using this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK8lWVms69Y
– weather station Hykker (data fetched from radio controller and processed using python script )
All of the components except „smart garden” and weather station will be compatible with Tuya standard.
In order to achieve this we would like to use RaspberryPI Zero or higher and following software:
https://www.home-assistant.io/

and of course tested already ActianZen DB 😉

Next steps will be described in our following posts;) Please follow our next posts….