Zygote: A Framework for Prototyping Smart Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT), which has had an unprecedented effect in the manufacturing industry, is now becoming increasingly popular in everyday life. Even with the rising interest in IoT among developers, there is no simple way for them to prototype and realize their ideas. As of today, developing an IoT project requires cross domain knowledge of hardware, embedded systems, communication protocols, and cloud and web technologies. We propose and implement the Zygote framework, a browser-based tool to lower the entry barrier and enable rapid prototyping and building of IoT projects. Zygote reduces the time and effort required to do so by providing a visual interface to configure, control and deploy an IoT application. It also exposes a REST API for programmatic control as well as a dashboard for quick data visualization. With its modular architecture, it supports the creation of custom plugins as required by the developer. The Zygote framework enables users to build IoT prototypes in minutes and with virtually zero lines of code.