ESP32 connecting Public Cloud with Internet of Things (IoT)

Post Digital Era a new buzzword of 2020. This term can easily scare people, happily working in their current role and start wondering Do we need to upskill again 🤔? But the real fact is that a lot is remaining in the digital transformation space, half of the world population haven't seen the transformation yet. Thus I am on my mission to educate and familiarize people in the world of digitization & I strongly believe that IoT (Internet of Things) has a lot of potentialities to solve real-life problems and complexities of the present World. Thus, I am quite passionate about IoT & exploring it to the fullest.

Thus, before moving forward with our agenda, one of my clients once told me that though Technology is evolving rapidly, Cloud-enabled us to avail any technologies as a service (XaaS), so industry needs smart people who can aggregate those solutions into a working model or else it's going to be a nightmare for enterprises to find the right people always. & It really makes sense. 😎

How to bring things into Cloud ?

Any IoT implementation on the cloud, requires a CCM (Cloud Communication Module) to connect remote Things with the cloud. By the technological point of view, either we can go for an MCU (microcontroller) or MPU (microprocessor). But it depends on the use case. MCU mostly used to enable sensors and modules to send telemetry data to the cloud and it can also receive interaction from the cloud (Pub-Sub Model) whereas MPU majorly used to enable edge computing for local execution.

Thus, Keeping the Edge Computing for another day (Tutorial is coming soon), we will discuss on microcontrollers and make it more streamline to ESP32 MCU, the de facto standard for cloud communication. It is supported by all major public cloud AWS, Azure and GCP & it's cheap, very very cheap (aliexpress) and got enough power to work like a charm. Most importantly, we need to stop fitting Raspberry Pi in all IoT implementation. Though Raspberry Pi is a powerful MPU and gives us lots of ability. Use it only for edge computing to move certain workloads to the edge of the network. 

ESP32 - The Real winner

To make any IoT Implementation valid we need requisite hardware available on-site which can send telemetry data to the Cloud. After that, the cloud takes care of the rest; Ingestion, Transformation, Extract and Visualization. But Vendor lock-in is a major barrier for all enterprises, where vendors are mostly providing closed Hardware solutions, making customization excruciating and interdisciplinary integration becomes impossible as Vendors are not ready to share their technology with other Vendors.

But if we shift to an open-source approach we can make things much easier. Just leverage ESP32 MCU, customize as per the business need with the ease of fast prototyping, security and cloud compatibility, to incorporate with other cloud-native services like Machine learning & AI, a good example is IBM Watson Internet of Things. 

The ESP32 is a cheap Wifi module perfectly suited for DIY projects in the Internet of Things (IoT) field. This module comes with GPIOs that support a wide variety of protocols like SPI, I2C, UART, and more. The best part is that they come with wireless networking included, which makes them apart from other microcontrollers like the Arduino. This means that you can easily control and monitor devices remotely via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (in case of ESP32) for a very low price.

ESP32, which is a $5 microcontroller with Wi-Fi & dual-mode Bluetooth capabilities. It is a successor to the ESP8266, with a faster CPU (dual-core @ 160 or 240 MHz), more ram (520 KiB SRAM), Bluetooth 4.2+BLE support, and cryptographic hardware acceleration (AES, SHA-2, RSA, ECC, RNG), which is very interesting for us, as we want data to be encrypted before being sent to the Cloud.

Most Interesting fact to keep you motivated

Isn't it flabbergasting that a small device like ESP32 got into the top 10 emerging tech skills 2020, competing and standing nip and tuck with Software Technologies? [Source : forbes.com]

So let's see something happen now.

ESP32 easily available at Amazon.com/Amazon.in/Aliexpress or get it from your neighbourhood Robotics stores, they cost around 6$ or 350-450 INR. Though the intent of the article not to show How to connect ESP32 with cloud? But that's something interests you, I made an entire tutorial on the same, Click here to start connecting ESP32 to AWS IoT with Arduino code. If you continue till the end, you will able to learn Home Automation along with it.

Conclusion

Whether you are a hobbyist or working for an organization. ESP32 is the base point to start your venture to the Internet of Things. Though it will take some time for people & enterprises to realise its potentiality. I am ready to put my bet on ESP32 and one day it will surely become a de-facto standard for both personal & industrial use. Thus, I will be doing more research and post my findings in the forums. Stay tuned & curious.

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