Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT) world, where millions of connected devices are now involved almost in our everyday life, including our homes, offices, transportation, and our healthcare, from home appliances, vehicles, smartphones to wearable devices like smartwatches. IoT is growing very fast and spreads very quickly.

Overview: This lab aims at providing the student with the practical concept of IoT systems design.

• It provides an overview of the IoT systems’ aspects including embedded intelligence, connectivity, interaction with the physical world, etc.
• It covers the main design and implementation issues for IoT devices and their applications. These issues challenge the students to tailor smart techniques to optimize the embedded software on IoT devices to meet the constrained resources.
• The students gain in-depth practical experiences in embedded system design with a focus on IoT applications as well as communication in connected devices.

Lab’s Goals:       

• The students will understand the main concept of IoT systems including the design objectives, application domains, and their requirements, design challenges, etc.
• The students will gain the ability to develop software programs for the IoT embedded devices, implement the code on the hardware, conduct the tests, find the bugs and errors, and debug the software code on the hardware.
• The students shall be able to implement and apply the concepts that are critical in the IoT domain, e.g. low power design, security, etc.
• The students will be able to develop, integrate and evaluate a small IoT system with its main components: sensors to get data from the physical world, the embedded processor for control the device and process the data, wireless radio to transmit the data from the device to the Internet, storage (on the Internet or on a Smart Phone) to keep the data for further analysis.

Target Audience: 

• This lab is also suitable for electrical engineering and informatics' students and those who have an interest in embedded systems design.

Prerequisites:

• The ability to develop software programs in C or C++ is recommended.
• Basic knowledge about other programming languages can be helpful (e.g., Java or Python)

Details:

• The lab manuals and exercises are conducted only in English.
• The lab is split into weekly sessions throughout the semester. Each session is approximately 3-4 hours per week. At the end of the semester, there would be a final project.
• The state-of-the-art low-power IoT boards and the corresponding development software, are used in the lab. Currently, Texas Instrument (TI) CC1350 microcontroller, and the latest version of Code Composer Studio is the base platform.
• The exercises in the lab are based on the TI repository. But for the final projects, the students have the flexibility to design their desired systems.