Project Prototype to Product – How?

We are almost at the finish line. This book has covered all the essentials required to get yourself familiar with numerous concepts related to Raspberry Pi and MQTT. But this is just the beginning! Now, the most important question arises: What Next?

This chapter provides the answer to this question. We will be covering a lot of important things that will assist you in choosing your future path.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Innovative project ideas
• IoT services provided by enterprise cloud platforms
• How to scale your projects using the current hardware

So, let’s get started!

Innovative project ideas

“Building projects is the best way to learn a technology, period.”

This is the motto I believe in. Learning a technology is not just about theory. You can read more than 100 books on a single piece of technology but to master it, you have to have hands-on experience in working with that technology. This helps you not only understand the nitty gritty details but also learn new things that you have to pick up while building a project:

Figure 8.1 – It all starts with an idea!

The projects chosen in this book were handpicked by me as I built them when I was first getting familiar with Raspberry Pi. We will cover two very popular project ideas that you can build to further expand your knowledge of Pi and the MQTT communication protocol.

Please note that this section only provides an overview of these ideas; you will have to research yourself and build them, which is how you will learn and master various technological...

IoT services provided by enterprise cloud platforms

Modern cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure provide a fully managed IoT system architecture that can help you do the following:

• Data collection and analysis
• Remote access and deployments
• IoT data security
• Third-party application integrations

The main advantage of using such a platform is that the hardware is completely managed by the cloud service provider, along with data security and access control management. This creates a very powerful and useful platform for a user managing numerous IoT devices on a single platform.

The whole system architecture is broken into four parts:

• Hardware Layer: All the IoT sensors and devices fall under this layer. Their primary task is data collection and sharing.
• Network Layer: The data that’s collected by the sensors must reach the IoT cloud platform in some way and that is through this layer. This can be a direct transfer – that is...

How to scale your projects using the current hardware

We discussed a lot of options for scaling our current setup, starting with using a cloud-hosted MQTT broker, in Chapter 7, Taking Your MQTT Broker Global. In the previous section, we discussed how we can use enterprise IoT platforms for this. But the main drawback of such products is that they are quite expensive and although they do provide customizations, there are always some drawbacks you may face while working on a particular use case.

For this reason, I have added this section as well. This will give you a gentle introduction to all the tools you will need to build an actual product using the existing tools that you have. For maximum customization, you always need to have your own software base, which you will have to develop from scratch. There are several approaches that you can take to achieve this, and, in this section, we will cover a few of them.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Home Assistant...

Summary

We covered a lot of topics throughout this book and provided several projects to help you practically implement the knowledge you’ve gained.

You have learned a variety of essential skills throughout this book. For instance, you can now set up your own Raspberry Pi and you know what MQTT is, which means you can use this communication protocol in any of your projects. Furthermore, you have learned how to set up the Node MCU and ESP32 development boards and how to write efficient and robust code for them. At this point, you can build two fairly complex prototype projects on your own: an IoT Weather Station and a Smart Home control system!

After that, you learned the basics of Bash (the language used to write and execute Linux commands) and how to set up an online MQTT broker, either on an independent provider or on your very own virtual machine. Finally, you learned how to connect your IoT devices to AWS IoT and how to connect your LAMP server to your Raspberry Pi...