Let’s take an IoT sensor…

stick it on some thing

and connect it to a gateway

.

Now let’s put out several more sensors.  Both the sensors and the gateway run Linux.

Each sensor sends a stream of data to the gateway and can also be configured to send alerts — emails, texts, etc– when the values fall outside a given range.

Let’s put out a lot more sensors.  This type of gateway can handle about 100 connections (350 connections maximum), so let’s add some gateways too.

Sensors will attach to the gateway with the strongest connection unless otherwise configured.

The battery life on these sensors — 2 years– lasts almost as long as the expected obsolescence of the device itself– 3-5 years.   Cool.

The sensor and gateway hardware manufacturer provides a dashboard.  That’s useful.  Now you can monitor and update devices.

Next let’s add more sensors and gateways to even more locations.

Now that we have lots of sensors out there on all different types of things, what do we do with it?

There’s too much data and too many devices to have a person monitoring each thing.

Ingesting this data isn’t that useful unless someone or something can do something with it.

… more soon