Building network-enabled smart sensors and actuators

The advent of the new Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm in last few years redefined the ways how the small embedded systems can enhance smart sensors and actuators to provide new possibilities in ubiquitously interconnected global world. Although there is a rising tendency in modern low-power embedded system design to provide some kind of IoT functionality out-of-the-box due to the availability of network-aware microcontrollers and system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, there is also a great need to upgrade legacy solutions to fit them into this new paradigm shift. In this article we describe a simple generic framework for upgrading legacy devices, which was built upon the state-of-the-art low cost and low power off-the-shelf hardware components, and open source software. The solution can be easily adapted for various types of smart sensors and actuators. We describe a common set of requirements for building such systems, design decisions reasoning, comparison and justification of HW/SW components choice, and sample demonstration of adaptation and upgrade of the chosen commercial equipment, a device for bubble production at children fun events and similar applications.