A lot of world’s leading companies experiment and implement IoT solutions for diverse operational areas. The growth of demand for IoT in both consumer and industrial uses is evident.
Internet of Things (IoT) provides gigantic scope of possible applications for:
People are resorting to blockchain for all kinds of reasons these days. Ever since I started doing smart contract security audits in mid-2017, I’ve seen it all. A special category of cases is ‘blockchain use’ that seems logical and beneficial, but actually contains a problem that then spreads from one startup to another. I am going to give some examples of such problems and ineffective solutions so that you (developer/customer/investor) know what to do when somebody offers you to use blockchain this way.
Disclaimers
The described use cases and problems occur at the initial stage. I am not saying these problems are impossible to solve. However, it is important to understand which solutions system creators offer for particular problems.
Even though the term ‘blockchain use’ looks strange and I am not sure that blockchain can be used for anything other than money (Bitcoin), I am going to use it without quotes.
1. Supply chain management
Let’s say you ordered some goods, and a carrier guarantees to maintain certain transportation conditions, such as keeping your goods cold. A proposed solution is to install a sensor in a truck that will monitor fridge temperature and regularly transmit the data to the blockchain. This way, you can make sure that the promised conditions are met along the entire route.
When you are sitting in your comfy chair in your cool modern office, anything distracting you from your favorite routine is really annoying. Some may call it a sign of sloth, but in fact, it relates to optimization of workflows. Our computers and smartphones provide us with many opportunities to do a lot without leaving our place. Software as such cares about our control over the physical world by just clicking and tapping. Indeed, the digitization advances: what people have had to do with their muscles for centuries in the past, could be done with either a voice command or a text message today thanks to numerous remotely controlled gizmos. And the IoT plays a crucial role in all this for a reason.
The very paradigm of automation where IoT solutions play a key role is based on a presumption that machines can act in both autonomous and intelligent manners. And what enables them doing so is a capability of handling tremendous flows of collected data.
The collectible data includes those various signals that both animate and inanimate object can send to the IoT systems. Hence, the objects should have some highly specific signal-generating devices to share information within the IoT.
“Come on, baby, what’s wrong? Tell me what you need,” my uncle Nicholas was shredding up his old car’s engine, which totally refused to start. Being a schoolboy back then, I was absolutely sure that any exhortation my uncle voiced was powerless against a dumb ton of metal. Talking to a car was just a psychological trick that probably helped my uncle cope with exasperation. Moreover, neither me nor my uncle believed in a possibility to communicate with “dead metal” sometime in the near future. That was in the mid-1980s. When I reached the age of my uncle, the situation changed radically.
Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.
Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:
