IO1: How embedded and IoT systems are different
What an IoT engineer does
🎯You'll be able to
Describe the parts of an IoT system and the work an IoT engineer does on each.
🏠The everyday picture
A village water committee wants to know when its tank is low. Someone fixes a small box at the top of the tank. It wakes every 15 minutes, measures the water, and sends the level to a phone. When the pump fails, the committee knows before people find dry taps.
📘What it really is
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The device: a microcontroller (a small computer on one chip), sensors that measure something, sometimes actuators that do something (a relay, a motor, a valve), a power source and a radio.
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Firmware: the program stored on the chip. It reads sensors, decides what matters, saves data, talks to the network and sleeps.
- The connection: Wi-Fi, a mobile network, LoRa, Bluetooth or a wired bus, chosen for range, power and cost.
- The cloud or server side: something that receives messages, stores them, raises alarms and shows dashboards.
- The IoT engineer works across all of these, with most of their attention on the device: power, reliability, talking to hardware, and getting data out safely.
📝A worked example
Input: the JalSetu tank monitor in the practice kit.
Steps:
- List the parts: an ESP32-class Wi-Fi board (simulated), the LV-20 level sensor on I2C, flash storage, a 2,000 mAh battery.
- List the firmware's jobs on each wake: read the level, decide whether to keep it, send every hour or at once for an alarm, sleep.
- List what the server side does: store readings, spot a low tank, show the committee a dashboard.
Expected output: a one-page picture of the system, from the sensor to the committee's phone.
🌍Where it's used
- Water and farming: tank levels, soil moisture and weather stations.
- Health: heart-rate bands and connected glucose meters.
- Cities: streetlights and traffic signals that report faults.
📝Case scenario
A housing society installed a cheap tank alarm that beeped when the tank was low. Nobody heard it from the flats. A connected monitor that sent a message to the caretaker's phone was more useful, even though the sensor itself was the same.
🖱️Try it
Pick one connected device you use. Write its parts: the sensor or input, the chip, the connection, and where the data goes. Success: a list with all four parts, marking any you're guessing.
⚠️Common mistakes
- Thinking only about the device. Sign: no plan for where the data goes. Fix: sketch the whole path to the person who acts on it.
- Thinking only about the cloud. Sign: a dashboard for a device that dies in a week. Fix: plan power and the connection first.
- Forgetting who acts on the data. Sign: readings nobody looks at. Fix: name the decision each reading helps someone make.
🛠️For your project
The capstone design notes start with the hardware and firmware approach. Keep your system sketch from this lesson.
✅Quick check
What is firmware?
Show the answer
The program stored on a device's chip that reads sensors, decides, communicates and sleeps.
What are the four main parts of an IoT system?
Show the answer
The device, its firmware, the connection, and the server side that stores and acts on the data.