TechBlog:Stay up-to-date on the various technical aspects of IoT developing.

As of now, probably most IoT solutions have a simple device communication strategy: Up to the cloud. This widespread pattern requires end devices to connect to some form of gateway or directly to server endpoints, typically with protocols such as MQTT or sometimes CoAP. Communication between devices is primarily a thing within the smart home where, for example, a temperature display talks to a thermostat to adjust heating. Quite a bit of this communication is proprietary, at least on the level of constrained devices.

The Thingforward team engages in all applications of IoT, including Smart Home Systems and Personal Assistant Technology, both of which are gaining popularity. We are seeing an increase in options for Personal Assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft Cortana, or Google Home to name a few. In this post, we’ll focus on Amazon’s Alexa.

SIGFOX is known for building up and operating a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), suitable for connecting sensors to the internet. In our previous blog posts we showed how to code firmware for different types of Sigfox transceivers and development boards. Now it’s time to connect the data stream to a nice backend. Enter com2m, a germany-based company, and their IoT Platform. Read on!

At ThingForward, we are testing new IoT solutions in order to provide solid support to our customers’ needs, and at our developer workshops, we’ve been using NodeMCU’s ESP8266 and the Grove Connector/Shield system for quite some time now. We still needed a Grove Base Shield for the new ESP32 but could not find it. So we decided to PCB-design our own :) Read our story about it here.