Now that you have a clear understanding of the platform that you’re dealing with, let’s first have a look at the objectives of the Internet of Things assignment, as part of the Interaction technology course.
The formal objectives are as follows:
- To acquire some advanced soldering skills. By getting hands on experience with the SMD soldering process, you’ll understand how electronic devices are manufactured in the electronics industry.
- To learn to program and build upon a more advanced microcontroller platform (ESP8266, 32-bit), including its built-in communication features (WiFi stack), as well as to gain knowledge of and learn to work with a set of more advanced sensors and actuators, including one of their communication protocols (I2C).
- To learn the workings, possibilities and limitations of one of the main protocols of the Internet of Things (MQTT) and how to use this protocol in an embedded system.
- To learn to build an IoT platform based on a diverse set of MQTT clients, including an embedded device, a desktop application, a mobile application and a client for flow based control and visualization, and to learn to make choices in light of both the possibilities that the protocol and the tools offer, as well as the hardware, software and functional requirements, in order to finally arrive at a smart and – most importantly – interactive IoT system, featuring a pleasant UX.
- To learn to conduct successful gesture elicitation to identify the right gesture set to control the IoT system.
- To learn to use an accelerometer and gyroscope sensor to detect gestures and to control the IoT system with gestures.
- To learn to do usability testing to ascertain whether your gesture set is as effective as expected and draw appropriate conclusions.
But in fact it all boils down to:
- To have fun exploring the world of the Internet of Things and to experience how easy (and difficult at the same time) it is to monitor and control an embedded system that interfaces to the real world, using an IoT platform and gestures.