The DIY Smart Era
What do you need to have to get your own Smart Device journey under way? While that is obviously a highly subjective question, I have tried to get the basic sort of starter kit and options together in this chapter to get you ready and going with a basic h
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The DIY Smart Era What do you need to have to get your own Smart Device journey under way? While that is obviously a highly subjective question, I have tried to get the basic sort of starter kit and options together in this chapter to get you ready and going with a basic home workbench. The options I have cited will also be required to complete the labs “as built,” but as I will point out throughout the process, half the fun of the smart device world is experimentation with new devices and options! So, in this chapter then, a quick look at the rise of the availability of smart device components, and then a “shopping list” if you will to get your lab in order.
Instant Gratification There have always been the home-brew crowd that was pushing the boundaries of what computing could do. The emergence of homebuilt and self-programmable computers in the 1970s and 1980s is evidence of this and progresses through the 1990s to the early 2000s when the first Ultra-Portable computing devices emerge. It is easiest to describe them as the now familiar “Arduino” devices and others like them – small, single- board computers with limited capabilities that were designed to support a single objective of allowing the device to interface with sensors and actuators. These immediately became the controller of choice for many industrial systems and were copied and cloned in thousands of different configurations. The inclusion of wireless, Bluetooth, Bluetooth/Mesh, © Christopher Harrold 2020 C. Harrold, Practical Smart Device Design and Construction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5614-5_2
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Chapter 2
The DIY Smart Era
and an increase in the reliability and availability of these units has created an opportunity for anyone who wants to make and control devices and elements with these powerful and small computers. The possibilities for wearable, personal, home control and automation, manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, city management, indeed just about anything you interact with could be instrumented and managed with these types of devices. The DIY era of the smart device has benefited from this rapid proliferation of hardware and software, to be sure, but without a distribution mechanism to get that hardware into your hands, there is no DIY smart revolution. No history of the smart device can, therefore, be complete without mentioning Amazon, Alibaba, MicroCenter, Fry’s, and every other mega retailer that handles technology components. It is not far off to make an argument that the ability to buy literally anything under the sun and have it sent directly to your door in a minimum amount of time has done more for DIY smart devices than any single other technology. Certainly, this is a grossly over-simplified way of saying that the global supply and manufacturing system, the advances in shipping and logistics, combined with the development of large-scale warehousing and fulfilment logistics are all the foundation on which the DIY movement depends, but the most visible and ubiquitous face of that series of developments is the
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