IoT prototyping using Block based programming: An use case of smart agriculture

The Internet of Things (IoT) has spread its wings in many sectors, such as autonomous driving, healthcare, agriculture, industry, home automation, the environment, smart grids, retail, and logistics. Building the IoT prototype requires knowledge of different disciplines, namely sensors, database programming, protocols, embedded systems programming, and mobile application development. The block-based programming removes all these dependencies and enables the student to build an IoT prototype. The block-based programming tools are available online as open source, which comes to aid in rapid IoT prototype development at ease.In this paper, we present the development of an IoT prototype with the use case of smart agriculture using a block-based programming platform available online. The functionalities provided to the agricultural robot (agribot) are ploughing, sowing, saving the data in the cloud database, and monitoring the temperature and humidity of the farming land.The results are promising; the developer can rapidly deploy the IoT prototype in different domains such as transportation, energy, cities, and industry.