Also known as: IoT, Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of everyday physical objects — sensors, appliances, wearables — with embedded computing and connectivity that lets them send and receive data.1
Overview
IoT devices are typically built on cheap wireless microcontrollers like the ESP32, each reading the world through sensors and reporting to a server or the cloud. Individually each node is tiny; collectively they number in the billions.
Most systems follow a tiered shape: constrained nodes at the edge, a gateway that aggregates and relays their traffic, and a backend that stores, analyses, and visualises the data. That structure keeps the per-node hardware — and its power draw — as small as possible.
Connectivity choices
Nodes reach the network in different ways depending on range, power, and data rate:
| Link | Range | Power | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi | Home / building | Higher | Smart-home gadgets |
| Bluetooth LE | Room | Low | Wearables, beacons |
| LoRa / LPWAN | Kilometres | Very low | Rural/field sensors |
| Cellular (NB-IoT/LTE-M) | Wide-area | Medium | Trackers, metering |
Where it fits
The appeal of IoT is putting just enough computing into ordinary objects to make them measurable and controllable from afar. Those same low-power wireless nodes are part of the radio landscape: their transmissions are among the signals filling the airwaves GopherTrunk listens to, though the devices themselves are far too small to run it. The tiered node-gateway-cloud pattern also mirrors a distributed SDR setup, where small capture nodes feed a central decode server.
Sources
-
Internet of things — Wikipedia, on networked physical objects with embedded computing and connectivity. ↩