IoT Bootcamp 2019

Introduction

IoT helps to deliver better services, improves the user experience of many products, reduces traffic, generally saves energy and resources while improving comfort, and makes the planet a better place. Of the numerous possible applications of IoT technology, we have perhaps only captured 5 percent, so the further economic and ecological potential is almost unimaginably great. In particular, the combination of IoT and cloud services enables a large number of applications that can be implemented quickly and efficiently. 

IoT Bootcamp 2019 at the Deloitte Digital Factory

At the IoT Bootcamp, the participants were introduced to the world of IoT and basic methods of designing IoT-related products following the Deloitte implementation framework. 

Together in a team, the attendees defined the characteristics of a system in the application domain of urban farming, specifically for the automatic watering of plants, and built a real prototype based on modern hardware and software. Additionally, the participants learned how to connect the product to a digital platform in the cloud to demonstrate the power of non-linear network effects, which facilitate completely new business models.

Ideation & Conceptualization

On the first day of the IoT Bootcamp 2019 the participants received an in-depth introduction to IoT and related vocabulary. Here all questions related to Digital Twins, IoT platforms, IoT reference architectures, communication protocols, cyber security including the method of digital signatures were discussed and answered. With that know-how, the attendees were subsequently guided through the ideation & conceptualization phase of a system for the automatic watering of plants. In teams the existing products for urban farming and competitors were analyzed and evaluated, ideas were generated, prioritized and refined, and a value proposition was created using proven Deloitte best practices, methods and tools. 

Implementation

On the second day, the participants learned how to analyze the business requirements elaborated the day before and translated them into a system architecture and a technical solution design. The design included an IoT edge device based on ESP32, which is a low-cost, low-power system on a chip microcontroller with integrated Wi-Fi and dual-mode Bluetooth. The architecture also included multiple sensors and actuators, communication via MQTT and a modern low-code platform in the cloud.  

During the implementation, the participants were guided systematically through the hardware setup of the prototype and through the implementation of the edge device software using the programming language C following a finite state machine paradigm. They also learned to implement a web application using the low code platform Node-RED. At the end of the two days, all participants had a fully functional prototype to take home with them.