© Adeel Javed 2016 253
A. Javed, Building Arduino Projects for the Internet of Things,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-1940-9_12
CHAPTER 12
IoT Platforms
IoT platforms provide developers with the ability to develop, deploy, and manage their
IoT applications from one central location in a secure manner. IoT platforms expedite
the development process by providing required tools in a cloud-based environment,
which means developers do not spend time on setups. A good IoT platform would ideally
include most of the tools that we have covered in the previous 11 chapters, such as MQTT
brokers, HTTP servers, REST API support, databases to store sensor data, Node-RED for
complex orchestrations, device location, secure communications, reporting, analytics,
and easy-to-use tools for building web and mobile apps.
This chapter covers a popular IoT platform called Xively. You are going to build a
soil moisture control system that sends out an e-mail alert whenever the moisture level
of the soil falls below a certain threshold. Figure 12-1 shows a high-level diagram of
all components involved in this system. The first component is an Arduino device that
monitors the soil moisture level and publishes a message to Xively. The second and third
components reside on the Xively platform. With some basic configuration, the platform
will be able to receive, store, and display data sent by the sensor.
Figure 12-1. Components of the soil moisture control system