My IoT Button: A Button for the Web Part 2: Prototyping with board and cloud

摘要

The basic idea of an IoT button is that you use minimalistic hardware to communicate with a remote service in the cloud. For this it is necessary to establish a connection to a local network. Small, low-cost microcontroller boards, such as the ESP8266 NodeMCU, are ideal for this task. Here we describe the relevant aspects with regard to the IoT device and present some ideas for your own projects. The nice thing is that it’s all relatively easy to do, and the positive experiences come quickly. This creates encouragement for developing your own projects. The Internet of Things (IoT) makes all imaginable devices smart and connects them to the outside world through the Internet. In the first article of this series, we outlined the basic architecture of an IoT landscape consisting of sensors, actuators, and a server backend. We saw that you usually do not have to set up your own server infrastructure, since there are many options available in the cloud. You communicate with them through the Internet. Things are really simple if you also adhere to the established standards. RESTful communication is widely used for requests. The client, which in this case is the IoT device, can send data to services (on a server) or request data from services. In the second article of this series, we look at the hardware and software aspects of the IoT device.