Which is the best platform to develop my IoT product?
The main purpose of any IoT device is to connect with other IoT devices and applications (cloud-based mostly) to relay information using internet transfer protocols. The gap between the device sensors and the data network is filled by the IoT platform.
The main aim of the IoT platform is to create a backbone for all the sensor data collected to make it more meaningful and provide insights using back-end applications to make sense of plethora of data generated by hundreds of sensors.
To choose the best platform for an IoT product development, conclusions can be drawn from various aspects be it in the perspective of research scholars, enthusiasts or on corporate level. Lets start with drawing up two of the most popular IoT device, the Arduino and the Raspberry-Pi and then the Bolt IoT platform. I have been doing some projects solely based on IoT devices and platform from the year of 2014 and I can say the progress of IoT in India has been exponential.
I made up certain points in which the comparison can be drawn like:
Network Connectivity: So as far as bare Arduino boards are concerned Arduino do not have any sort of network connectivity , can only be achieved with the help of wi-fi shield or an Ethernet shield. The main difficulty for the shields is that of compatibility and you have to draw up extra libraries to make them work. Raspberry Pi got an on-board WiFi chip(802.11 b/g/n) and Ethernet port. This enables seamless connectivity among the sensors and web servers. The Bolt IoT offers Wi-Fi or GSM variant for developers or enterprise package.
Cost: Arduino is available at a price of Rs 2500 (Mega variant), while Raspberry Pi 3 is available at a price point of Rs 2900 in India and Bolt IoT platform is available for the price of Rs 1750 in the developer’s package.
Storage: Arduino offers no on-board storage capacity except for the ROM space, need to rely on the SD-Card modules for storage operations. Raspberry Pi has got the option for on board storage, can support upto 64 GB of SD card. Though Bolt IoT platform does not offers any on-board storage instead it offers cloud space along with the device, coupled with the seamless connectivity making it a smooth experience.
Cloud platform: Both the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi depends on third party cloud architecture to process the data for meaningful applications where as one of the best feature of Bolt is its cloud platform. The platform acts as a seamless connectivity option. You can gather data, use them in Google Graphs embedded in it and also remotely control a device present in your device panel.
A simple case study:
Here I am taking an example of one of my projects that might have ended up with a better result if I had used the Bolt IoT Platform for the project, instead of the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi.
This is the project which I took up during my internship at Media Labs Asia (MHRD- India), it deals with a number of gas detecting sensors namely MQ series (MQ 7, MQ135) of sensors & requires their data to be recorded in a highly precise manner along with the time stamp. Initially I used Arduino Mega 2560 which resulted in a lot of voltage fluctuations resulting to malfunctioning of the sensors because Arduino was unable to supply constant current to all the 3–5 sensors attached to it. But after we segregated the current supply for the sensors there were problems regarding the sensor data and the SD-card module. The thing is that we needed to collect the data from the SD card after every 3-4 days. So we had to go to the location where the device has been deployed, then switch-off the entire device and copy the data to our system and then replace the SD-card back to its place in the device for the next cycle. This resulted in the loss of data for the time when the device was shutdown. We also needed the data to be visualised in real-time and store that for the further analysis and development of the algorithm. Lucky for us, we had our own data visualisation & AI application developed in-house which just needed data to be pulled in order to generate analytics or else it would have required another couple of months just for developing the basic or primitive data visualisation system.
Had the project used the Bolt IoT platform, things would have been very easy from the start, from storing the data to making it connect to the internet for real-time data collection to the data visualisation & AI predictions, Bolt offers a complete platform ready to be deployed.
The rapid growth of the IoT paradigm needs powerful IoT software platforms which addresses the needs presented by the IoT use-cases. In this blog I have investigated the features of the current state-of-the-art IoT software platforms. From this blog-post it is absolutely clear in how and why to choose a particular platform to take maximum advantage of the features offered. Hence, below you can find an overall comparision between the three platforms discussed above to give you a proper understanding of each of the three platforms.
If you are looking to build an IoT product or looking for an end to end IoT solution for your company? I will be glad to speak to you and guide through the process. Please fill this short form at http://boltiot.com/app/consult.php to schedule a call.
