Is Internet of The Things a technology of the future?
The future is now?
To my personal opinion – this IS NOT a new technology – but it is a new trend that we have seen. The technology itself has existed for years, but with the advancement of new smaller and more efficient component, it has managed to allow people to use the technology into various applications. As a blogger for Make Web Video, I have heard about using sensors that read taps on CANBUS of a bus – to read all sorts of information related to the engine. The information is then sent into a central server that churns the data into useful information. The churned data will come out with output that will help in Predictive Monitoring. Read here –> http://www.cwhonors.org/case_studies/MetroStLouis.pdf
I am sure – it was so much harder than as there are no common frameworks and common services that will help top expedite the work. Nowadays – its so much easier. Not just there are boards and chips that are available(Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, edisons) – but there are also services such as Azures and Xively that allows information to be consolidated. In addition to that – cellular data are a lot cheaper compared to almost 9 years ago.
The question now – is that would we use IoT now that will help us? Would it be home automation? Predictive Monitoring? Smart weather station? Man – it’s limitless.
There are still burning questions that we would need to figure out. Examples are like:
- Batteries and power –> are solar reliable?
- Out of town connectivity –> Zigbees, is that possible?
- On site sensor support –> is that even cost efficient?
Well – am sure there will be some smart guy who will figure out this. It is wrong to think that example issues highlighted above is small. Those are real problem impacting real pilot projects. I’ve seen it being used and hitting those problems. But – technology is a like a fast moving train, it won’t stop. We just need to be focused to be able to fix those problems. We don’t live in an ideal world.