Programming the Internet of Things

Chapter 1. Getting Started

IoT Basics and Development Environment Setup

A path lies ahead,

Brambles and thorns, then it clears.

Almost there. Patience.

Fundamental concepts: Identify a problem area to tackle and define an architecture as the baseline for your IoT solution; set up an IoT-centric development environment that supports multiple deployment options.

You’ve likely gathered by  now that the Internet of Things can be vast, unwieldy, and very difficult to tame. To plan a way forward, we’ll first want to identify a problem area to tackle and then create an architecture from which to design and build our IoT solution.

Let’s start with a few key questions to establish a baseline: What problem are you trying to solve? Where does it start and end? Why does it require an IoT ecosystem? How will all of the pieces work together to solve this problem? What outcome can you expect if everything works as designed? We’ll explore each of these questions in detail, and along the way we’ll construct an end-to-end, integrated IoT solution that meets our needs.

What You’ll Learn in This Chapter

To help you really understand how an IoT system can and should be constructed, I’ll dig into some basic architectural concepts based on the preceding questions and use this as the basis for each programming activity. From there, you’ll build a solution that addresses the problem layer by layer, adding more functionality as you work through each subsequent chapter.

It goes without saying, of course, ...