Enabling technologies for IoT development

Small scale / hobby IoT development has become much easier due to the following:

• It is possible to buy electronic components in small numbers cheaply and reliably from China. It is a miracle of logistics that I get a couple of transistors for a couple of bucks, shipped to my doorstep from the other side of the world in two weeks!
• Arduino, it's IDE and tons of libraries for all sorts of devices saves you from dealing with details of device drivers.
• Machine learning with Tensorflow, OpenCV, and Raspberry Pi.
• Cheap and reliable web services like AWS.
• Easy to use server environments like NodeJS.
• Last but not least, YouTube gets you up and running quickly.

We live in amazing times where everyone can tinker with electronics because the barriers to entry are so low now. Even my father who is 73 years old asked me the other day where he can get some breadboards! Imagine what the youngsters of today will come up with in the future.

Modifying Toys

As a hobby, I like playing with Arduinos and having the ability to control real world devices like sensors and motors. Recently I decided to add a Cylon/KITT eye to my son's old robot toy:

First I bought an Arduino Pro Micro and an addressable LED strip. I cut the LED strip to fit into the robot's head, wrote a sketch to simulate Cylon eye and tested the setup:

Then I made sure that it worked with 3 AA batteries:

Then I squeezed in the LED strip into the robot's head and tested once more:

Then I verified that it worked with the robot's batteries:

Finally I assembled the whole robot:

The hardest part was fitting the pro micro and all the extra cables into the robot's body.

What's the point of all of this you ask? First of all, I like doing such things. And secondly... Watch Eli's video: The Value of "Hobbies" for Tech Professionals.