Learning IoT: Basic Experiments of Home Automation using ESP8266, Arduino and XBee

Extensive implementation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems increases the needs of IoT engineers. However, some available IoT-trainer modules, which needed to equipped engineers with IoT skills, are quite expensive and exclusive for private institutions. This research proposes an IoT-trainer design that offers seven simple experiments to understand IoT concepts, which classified into three aspects: IoT devices, connectivity, and cloud or application system. All devices are available and purchasable from the market, low-price, and easy to configure: ESP8266 (NodeMCU-12E, and ESP-01), Arduino Uno, and Xbee. Moreover, the platforms that we use to tunnel a network and processing data are also open source: Ngrok, ThingSpeak, and 000webhost. By exploiting this simple, inexpensive IoT-trainer design and experimenting with those seven scenarios, learners can study the basic concept of IoT as infrastructure.

I. Introduction

A rapid transformation of the technology era has introduced a new lifestyle. In the previous decade, we use the internet mainly for communications: e-mail, chatting, video calls. However, the internet helps us in almost every aspect of our daily lives, from online shopping, navigation, and work. Recently, the internet is not only connecting people; it also connects machines to facilitate social works and increase productivity. Such a scheme is called Internet-of-Things (IoT) [1]. The IoT enables us to maintain services conveniently: without any human intervention. For example, in agriculture, we can automatically give nutrition to the plantations by reading its temperature, humidity, and nutrition level. The actuators will then act to add more nutrition based on the reading. Farmers can control and monitor the situation anywhere in the world since they can read all parameters by using the internet. In 2020, an IoT technology would widely implement in various objects: from connecting people, services, vehicles, to home and buildings. [2]