Democratizing IoT design with open source development boards and communities

Cliff Ortmeyer, Newark, Mar. 22, 2017 – The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of what the World Economic Forum has identified as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an economic, technical, and cultural transformation that combines the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It is driven by such technologies as ubiquitous connectivity, big data, analytics and the cloud.

The "democratization of computing" may sound like a nerdy rallying cry, but it's a revolution that's been brewing for a while. By breaching the walls that have traditionally divided hardware and software disciplines, the democratization movement has picked up pace recently with the advent of new technologies and forging of fresh communities around one of the most buzzed about technical trends in recent years - the IoT.

However, if the IoT is poised to bring greater opportunity to technology audiences, then its workflows will need to be simplified and make better use of modularized components to address very real technical challenges that IoT designs entail, from software design and sensor networking to cloud on-boarding. Development kits, single-board computers (SBCs), and prototyping platforms such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino are part of a new generation of open source, low-cost, and easy-to-use hardware components that are opening up IoT solution development to a much larger group of developers and serving as a reference design for IoT innovation.

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