Chapter 2
Hardware for IOT Solutions
Most IOT solutions, whether they are built by hand or mass produced for commercial sale, are prototyped
from basic designs using discrete components. Most hobbyists and enthusiasts base their solutions on
components they can buy from retailers (or wholesalers if they produce many units for sale). Much of the
commodity hardware therefore is readily available.
This chapter introduces several examples of the more popular commodity hardware you can use in
building your IOT solutions. Since there are so many varieties of everything available, I will not attempt or
claim this chapter is all-inclusive. For example, I briefly describe a few of the common low-cost computing
boards available, but there are more being added every day. It would require a tome several times the size of
this book to list all of them. However, I show examples of how to use some of the hardware mentioned in this
chapter in Chapter 8.
Included in this chapter are a discussion of popular Arduino microcontroller boards, a brief tutorial on
using the Arduino software, a discussion of popular low-cost computing boards, a survey of communication
hardware, and even a short discussion on what sort of sensors are available.
While you do not need to become an expert on any of the hardware listed, reading through this chapter
will get you the knowledge you need to select which hardware to buy and get started using the hardware.
After all, this is a book on using MySQL for IOT solutions rather than an in-depth instruction on how to build
IOT solutions—but I have some of this information in this chapter and more in Chapter 8.
Let’s begin by examining one of the most common and perhaps the single most versatile hardware
component available for IOT solutions—the microcontroller.
hOBBYISt Or eNthUSIaSt: What’S the DIFFereNCe?
Enthusiasts build things because they can and often because they get a lot of enjoyment out of the
build, not necessarily because they need to build it. Enthusiasts also tend to indulge in stockpiling or
collecting. A hobbyist builds things for a singular purpose and do not normally indulge as much as
enthusiasts. Thus, an enthusiast is a hobbyist who has turned the corner on avocation versus obsession.Microcontrollers
Microcontrollers^1 are small integrated circuit (IC) chips arranged on a small printed circuit board (PCB)
with additional components to support features such as access to pins on the chip for connecting other
components such as LEDs, servos, sensors, and more. Microcontrollers tend to be limited in the amount of