Applicability of commodity, low cost, single board computers for Internet of Things devices

We can expect the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to rapidly increase, in part due to the availability of low cost powerful hardware. These advances in hardware introduce a new class of computer - the commodity low-cost Single Board Computer (SBC); for example the Raspberry Pi. These devices are capable of running a full operating system and are accessible to non-technical users. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of using this class of computer to construct IoT devices without deep technical knowledge of embedded systems. Our IoT device is targeted at real world data collection and is the basis of a deployed device. We discover that although the existing SBC hardware on the market varies dramatically, much of it is very applicable to IoT scenarios. Generally their default out of the box configuration supports one or more Linux variants, high-level programming languages and standard hardware libraries. They are very configurable and attractively priced - we predict a growth in using this class of computer particularly for IoT prototypes; disposable compute or low hardware volume scenarios. In the future we can expect hardware improvements and enhanced operating systems taking into account the issues surrounding IoT devices, such as SD card storage corruptions, power consumption and improved failure detection.