Sunday, January 4, 2015

UDOO as IoT gateway

At the Maker Faire Rome Conference I have bought a UDOO board.
I have read about it in the past and I was really interested in discovering how it was easy to use, and if I could run on it almost the same SW that can be run on a Raspberry PI.

I have received a very good impression.
Now I was thinking about IoT and UDOO.



The idea that I have is that UDOO can really be an effective platform for prototyping IoT gateway application.

On UDOO you can run these software:
  • Raspbian (Linux) OS
  • Apache
  • Oracle Java VM (HFP)
  • Mosquitto (MQTT broker)
  • Eclipse PAHO client
  • MySQL
  • PHP
With this software stack you can easily build sofisticated gateway IoT application and communicate with other nodes on the network.

As sensor nodes it is better to use cheaper devices, for examples based on Arduino technology. 
In addition Arduino is perfectly suited for interacting with sensors and actuators.
UDOO is Arduino compatbile, you can attach to it all the kind of sensors you would normally use on Arduino, and run Arduino sketches. But in order to realize a multi-layer architecture it is better to divide sensors and gateway layers.
The last pieces I'm considering is the network technology most suited for the communication between sensors and gateways.
One easy choice would be to use WIFI, if the range is limited to your home, for example in a Home Automation solution. In this case a simple choice would be to adopt Arduino YUN as board for sensors. With Grove shields you could easily experiment with different kind of sensors.
YUN is not a really cheap solution. WIFI is not cheap, but it is a simple solution to implement.

As application protocol, one choice that I would make is to adopt MQTT. In my view MQTT is perfect for transmitting messages from sensor nodes to the gateway.
It is a lightweight protocol, reliable, based on the publish-subscribe design pattern.

Ah, one last thing: UDOO has been entirely designed in Italy. Nice.

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