Lessons Learned After Developing My First Big IoT Project
Carrying out a project is always associated with doubts and problems, and even more so if it is in a new area you have never worked on before. In this post we will explain the problems we have found during the development of our first big IoT (Internet Of Things) project and the lessons learned from them.
What was the aim of the project?
The main purpose of this project is to create an affordable system that allows the monitoring of the different factors that affect the correct conservation of marine species within a marine hatchery.
Different hardware elements were used to create this system: an Arduino board, a Raspberry Pi, analogue sensors, digital sensors, relays, etc. All these elements conform our IoT environment and communicate with a backend and a frontend to provide the complete system.
Lesson 1: Lack of information leads to future mistakes
When tackling an IoT project it is necessary to research very well before even starting to select the hardware components that are going to be used. An element that in advance may seem perfect for our use case may be useless when joining it to the rest of the components.
This happened in our project. Starting with relays that could not be connected to our Raspberry Pi, to cables that were too long, to sensors for which we had no interface and a whole host of bad decisions.
Lesson 2: The electric current runs out, it is not infinite
In simple IoT projects, there are problems that will never appear. However, in a big IoT project composed of several elements, problems related to interferences between components and power shortages start to appear.
In our case the problem happened because we tried to connect too many components to our Raspberry Pi, which only has one power input. Connecting so many components to the same controller board without providing another power source resulted in some of the components not receiving enough power to function properly.
The solution would be to provide a new power supply with enough power to allow all components to work properly.
Lesson 3: Energy goes out as heat, and heat goes out as problems
High temperatures are always a problem when we talk about technology. The extra heat produced in electrical components (Joule effect) reduces their performance and can even cause more serious problems.
In our case, due to the excess heat dissipated by the Raspberry Pi because of having so many components connected, the MicroSD card used as a storage unit bent, forcing us to buy a new card and reconfigure the system from zero.
A good solution would be to add a cooling system or to use heatsinks on the controller board.
Conclusions
If we look at the lessons learned, all of these are consequence of a lack of knowledge.
It’s impossible not to have doubts and obstacles when you’re learning, applying these lessons can help you avoid some of the most annoying problems when starting in the IoT world.
