Designing the Internet of Things (eBook)

Adrian McEwen, Hakim Cassimally (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-43065-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Take your idea from concept to production with this unique guide

Whether it's called physical computing, ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of Things, it's a hot topic in technology: how to channel your inner Steve Jobs and successfully combine hardware, embedded software, web services, electronics, and cool design to create cutting-edge devices that are fun, interactive, and practical. If you'd like to create the next must-have product, this unique book is the perfect place to start.

Both a creative and practical primer, it explores the platforms you can use to develop hardware or software, discusses design concepts that will make your products eye-catching and appealing, and shows you ways to scale up from a single prototype to mass production.

• Helps software engineers, web designers, product designers, and electronics engineers start designing products using the Internet-of-Things approach
• Explains how to combine sensors, servos, robotics, Arduino chips, and more with various networks or the Internet, to create interactive, cutting-edge devices
• Provides an overview of the necessary steps to take your idea from concept through production

If you'd like to design for the future, Designing the Internet of Things is a great place to start.

Adrian McEwen (Liverpool, UK) is an Internet of Things expert. He co-wrote and runs the Howduino course, teaching about Arduino across the UK. Adrian is the curator of official Arduino Ethernet Library. He has prowled the rooftops of Liverpool City Centre embedding Arduino sensors into the city’s infrastructure.

Hakim Cassimally (Liverpool, UK) is an Italian and English Literature Graduate who discovered Perl and never looked back. A writer of SciFi, Hakim founded a study group for the Stanford AI distributed learning classes.

Inhalt

Introduction 1

PART I: PROTOTYPING 5

Chapter 1: The Internet of Things: An Overview 7

Chapter 2: Design Principles for Connected Devices 21

Chapter 3: Internet Principles 41

Chapter 4: Thinking About Prototyping 63

Chapter 5: Prototyping Embedded Devices 87

Chapter 6: Prototyping the Physical Design 147

Chapter 7: Prototyping Online Components 173

Chapter 8: Techniques for Writing Embedded Code 205

PART II: FROM PROTOTYPE TO REALITY 225

Chapter 9: Business Models 227

Chapter 10: Moving to Manufacture 255

Chapter 11: Ethics 289

Index 311

Textauszug

2
Design Principles for Connected Devices

This book is called Designing the Internet of Things, so does that mean we think design is an important part of building a connected device?

For some applications, you may think that design isn’t important at first glance. Who cares what the box holding a production-line sensor looks like in a factory? Surely form is defined by function?

Although the physical design of your connected device may be less important than that of something you’re going to set on your mantelpiece, the extra functionality regarding how it will interact with the rest of the factory and its control systems is something you should consider and think through rather than just leave to chance.

If you haven’t spent much time with designers, you might be forgiven for thinking that design is merely concerned with the shape and look of an object—something ornamental, to give it a pleasing appearance. However, design is a much wider field than that.

Industrial design (sometimes also called product design) does include the form and decoration of the item, but it also covers functional aspects such as working out how the product will be constructed or ensuring the controls are easily understood.

The user interface to the object—be that on a screen or the more traditional buttons and switches—is also something of interest to the discipline of experience design. That takes the perspective of the end user of the design as its focus and seeks to create the best solution for the user. Obviously “best” is subjective and could aim to make using the device as enjoyable as possible, or perhaps as efficient as possible, depending on the priorities of the designer or her team.

The rise of digital services, particularly those which take advantage of the Internet and the network effects it enables, has led to design specialists who take a wider view of the design of the whole system. Service design has the broadest view of the service in its entirety, whereas interaction design also looks at how different parts of the system interrelate, and especially how the user features in that interaction.

There are no hard boundaries between these differing facets of design, but we think designers of all types would agree that design is about more than just the surface look of the device.

In this chapter we look at some of the overarching principles that can be applied when designing an Internet of Things system, and then visit some of the techniques you can use to help explore the problem space and end up with a stronger product. Not all the techniques apply in all cases, but they provide some useful rules of thumb in approaching your work.

Calm and Ambient Technology

The Internet of Things has its roots in the work done by Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the 1990s. His work didn’t assume that there would be network connectivity but was concerned with what happens when computing power becomes cheap enough that it can be embedded into all manner of everyday objects. He coined the term ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp for short, to describe it, and through his research and writing sought to explore what that would mean for the people living in such a world.

With its focus on computing power being embedded everywhere, ubicomp is often also referred to as ambient computing. However, the term “ambient” also has connotations of being merely in the background, not something to which we actively pay attention and in some cases as something which we seek to remove (e.g., ambient noise in a sound recording).

We prefer, as did Mark Weiser, the term calm technology—systems which don’t vie for attention yet are ready to provide utility or useful information when we decide to give them some attention.

Such proliferation of computing devices into the world comes with all manner of new challenges. Issues include configuration, how to provide power to all these items, how they talk to each other, and how they communicate with us.

The power and networking challenges are purely technical and are driving developments such as 6LoWPAN (www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/6lowpan-charter.html). This is a standards drive from a working group of academics, computing professionals, and others to take the next-generation Internet protocol (IPv6) to the simplest and lowest-power networked sensors. (It is revisited when we look at future developments in the next chapter.) It aims to provide the scale of addresses and lower power usage needed by so many sensors.

Configuration and user interaction, however, obviously involve people and so are difficult problems to solve with just technical solutions. This is where good design can aid in adoption and usability. You can see this with the introduction of the Apple iPod in 2001. It wasn’t the first portable MP3 player, but the combination of the scroll-wheel user interface and the companion iTunes software made it much easier to use and turned them into mass market gadgets.

Designing a connected device in isolation is likely to lead you to design decisions which aren’t ideal when that object or service is placed into the seething mess that is the real world. To bastardize Eliel Saarinen’s maxim on design, we suggest you think of how the connected device will interact as one of a wealth of connected devices.

In addition to thinking of a device in the physical context one step larger—Saarinen’s “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan”—we should do the same for the services.

For connected devices which are just sensing their world, or generally acting as inputs, as long as their activity doesn’t require them to query the people around them, there shouldn’t be any issues. They will happily collect information and deposit it into some repository online for processing or analysis.

When the devices start interacting with people, things get more complicated. Already we’re seeing the number of notifications, pop-ups, and indicator noises on our computers and mobile phones proliferate. When we scale up this number to include hundreds of new services and applications and then spread that across the rest of the objects in our world, it will become an attention-seeking cacophony.

Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown proposed an antidote to such a problem by suggesting we design ubiquitous computing systems to seek to blend into their surroundings; in so doing, we could keep them in our peripheral perception until the right time to take centre stage:

Calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two.

—Designing Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995

A great example of this approach is Live Wire, one of the first Internet of Things devices. Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko when she was in residence at Xerox PARC under the guidance of Mark Weiser, Live Wire (also sometimes called Dangling String) is a simple device: an electric motor connected to an eight-foot long piece of plastic string. The power for the motor is provided by the data transmissions on the Ethernet network to which it is connected, so it twitches whenever a packet of information is sent across the network.

Under normal, light network load, the string twitches occasionally. If the network is overloaded, the string whirls madly, accompanied by a distinctive noise from the motor’s activity. Conversely, if no network activity is occurring, an unusual stillness comes over the string. Both extremes of activity therefore alert the nearby human (who is used to the normal behaviour) that something is amiss and lets him investigate further.

Not all technology need be calm. A calm videogame would get little use; the point is to be excited. But too much design focuses on the object itself and its surface features without regard for context. We must learn to design for the periphery so that we can most fully command technology without being dominated by it.

—Designing Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC December 21, 1995

The mention of the distinctive sound from the motor when the Live Wire is under heavy load brings up another interesting point. Moving the means of conveying information away from screens and into the real world often adds a new dimension to the notification. On a computer, updating the screen is purely visual, so any additional senses must be engaged explicitly. Like Live Wire, Bubblino—Adrian’s Internet of Things bubble machine which searches Twitter and blows bubbles when it finds new tweets matching a search phrase (see the case study in Chapter 4)—is a good example in which the side effect of the motor is to generate an audible notification that something is happening. With their Olly (www.ollyfactory.com) device, agency Mint Digital combines the motor with a deliberate olfactory indicator to provide a smelly notification of one of a number of social media events.

These noisy “side effects” are something that we should also be wary of losing with a move to “better” technology. Years ago all airport and railway arrival and departure boards were built using split-flap displays. They consisted of a number of flaps on a roll—sometimes with full place names printed onto the flap, and in other times as individually...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.11.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Netzwerke
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Web / Internet ► Web Design / Usability
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Weitere Themen ► Hardware
• Schlagworte: Computer Hardware • Computer Science • getting started with the internet of things, designing internet of things applications, internet of things definition, books on pervasive computing, books on ubiquitous computing, guide to pervasive computing, guide to ubiquitous computing, how to design interactive products, creating internet of things products, internet of things overview, how to create devices, guide to creating interactive devices, creating smart devices, book by Adrian McEwen, Adrian McEwen guide to internet of things • Hardware • Informatik
• ISBN-10: 1-118-43065-4 / 1118430654
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-43065-1 / 9781118430651