The IoT Node and its Processor

As already indicated in the introduction an IoT node consist of an Internet enabled processor with interfaces to external sensor and actuator hardware. On the Internet side connections can be made through

• Ethernet
• WiFi
• or any gateway giving access to the Internet. This can be
  • a serial connection to a machine with internet access
  • a LoRaWan node connected to a base station (which is connected to the Internet)
  • a BlueTooth connection to an Internet enabled processor ...

There are plenty of processors available on the market, many of which are ARM based devices with a big variety of external interfaces. There are however two extremely popular processor families which we want to have a look into:

• The Raspberry Pi, which is a full blown computer system running a Debian based Linux operating system with all the tools needed to develop software natively. The Raspberry Pi 3 for example features a quad core 64 bit ARM processor with 1 GByte of RAM and a micro SD card with up to 32 GBytes of storage space. Due to its capabilities the Raspberry Pi is a rather expensive solution (~ 70 Euros) especially it only a very limited number of sensors or actuators are connected.
• The Arduino. Originally the Arduino used 8 bit AVR processors and is much less powerful than the Raspberry Pi. The most interesting part of the Arduino family is an Integrated Development Environment running on Windows and on Linux machines and featuring a C++ like programming language. The IDE contains a compiler and a flash programmer for the processor used. The IDE has been extended to processors different from the AVR family and can now be used also for ESP8266 or ESP32 processors or for the STM32 family of processors. In all cases however the software is cross-developed and the resulting binaries are loaded into the processor flash.
  The standard AVR Arduino does not have an Internet connection but there are piggy back boards, so called shields that can be plugged on top of the processor board and Ethernet or WiFi shields are available. Processors like the ESP8266 or the ESP32 have Wifi already available on the processor board. The advantage of the Arduino is its price. It is possible to create an IoT node with one or two sensors or actuators for ~ 2-3 Euros.

-- Uli Raich - 2019-02-12

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