The hardware

Popular IoT development boards include Arduino, Beagle Board, Pinocchio, Raspberry Pi, and Cubieboard, among others. These development boards are used for prototyping IoT solutions. They include microcontrollers (MCUs), which serve as the brains of the device, provide memory, and a number of both digital and analog General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins. These boards can be modularly stacked with other boards to provide communication capabilities, new sensors, sactuators, and so on to form a complete IoT device.

MCUs well suited for IoT development come from ARM, Intel, Broadcom, Atmel, Texas Instruments (TI), Freescale, and Microchip Technology, among others. MCUs are Integrated Circuits (ICs) that contain a processor, Read-Only Memory (ROM), and Random Access Memory (RAM). Memory resources are frequently limited in these devices. Often, manufacturers IoT-enable physical products by augmenting the MCUs with complete network stacks, interfaces, and RF/cellular transceivers. All of this horsepower is going into system-on-chip configurations and miniaturized daughter boards (single board computers).

In terms of IoT sensor types, the sky's the limit. Examples include temperature sensors, accelerometers, air quality sensors, potentiometers, proximity sensors, moisture sensors, and vibration sensors. These sensors are frequently hardwired into the MCU for local processing, responsive actuation, and/or relay to other systems.