Arduino and IoT Seminar by Top Engineers

Last weekend, that’s on 21st of January, we attended a workshop on ‘Internet of Things using Raspberry Pi and Python’ conducted by ‘Top Engineers’ team. Two presenters handled the workshop and we went with high expectations. It was from 9.30AM to 3.30PM comprising of three sessions.

The first session started with an introduction on IoT by Mr. Jeyachandran who is a Professor . He explained about things like,

1. what is IoT?

2. Why is it needed?

3. What are the components requires?

4. What is big data?

what is IoT?

Internet of things means connecting ‘things’ with the internet. ‘Things’ can be anything like mobile phones, watches, computers, headphones, glasses etc. When the things are connected together, a huge amount of data is to be handled.

Why is it needed?

It helps in simplifying the lives of people. For example, if you tell your computer that you have to reach a place tomorrow by 10AM, your mobile phone knows it as it is connected to the computer via the internet. It analyses the route to the place and the traffic and suggests you the best route and the time taken to reach there. This also saves the time of the user to a greater extent.

What are the components required?

There are three large categories of components required,

- sensors

- cloud

- big data

What is big data?

By the word ‘big data’ we may understand that the data is big. But how big is the data? or what is the size of the big data? There is no definite answer for this. It is defined that, if the data is large and complex enough that traditional dataprocessing equipments are inadequate to deal with them. In this case we need a different methodology for processing the data.

In the second session, he explained about the Raspberry PI.

What is Raspberry PI?

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom. It contains several ports (USB, HDMI and Ethernet) for connecting keyboard, mouse, monitor, router etc and also a 128MB SD card which serves as a hard-disc. There are several operating systems that can be installed into the SD card and the most familiar one being the raspbian os which is a linux based operating system. This Raspberry PI is programmed using Python. For those who cannot afford to buy a hardware, a simulator is available on the official website (www.raspberrypi.org) which can downloaded and installed.

With Raspberry PI we can we do a lot of things like,

1. Scratch — which is a tool used to create simple animations and help children to learn programming

2. It can be used for preparing charts like Graphing the weather

3. We can use it for Physical Computing with Python

4. There are simple games like Minecraft

5. It is also possible to do a lot more things like image processing

In the last session that’s in the afternoon, demonstrations of a few projects were presented by the other presenter from Afghanistan. We expected that it will be demonstrated using Raspberry PI but instead they used Arduino UNO.

The following were the demos

1. Blinking of LED

2. Interfacing an IR sensor to the arduino which was used as an obstacle detector

3. Gas detection using MQ 5 sensor and buzzer intimation

4. A simple demo of home automation — The arduino board was connected with the mobile via bluetooth and an app from converting voice to text was installed in the mobile. When we say ‘tubelight ON’, it converts it to text and sends it to the arduino board and an LED glows.

With this it came to an end. Overall the seminar was informative, but not up to the expectations of most of us.