Introduction:
In the world of science and technology, Internet played a significant role in the past decade. Talking further about the internet, the Internet-Of-Things (IoT) has become the talk in the town. In the near future it is soon going to grab a stronger foothold as IoT will transform the way we live. Whether it is the door for a fridge or the garden in your house, there will be sensors installed that would measure and send the data to the cloud.
With the increasing scope of IoT, engineering students can see IoT as a tremendous opportunity to build their careers. From organizations, IoT will demand an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many companies haven’t yet mastered. There are so many IoT technologies that are still emerging.
These changes further demand to increase skill set of an individual or organizations. It leads to further question what are the best courses in IoT programming? How do I get started in the skill-building journey?
What are the best courses in IoT programming?
IoT courses are very challenging to define! It’s mainly because of its inter-disciplinary nature. IoT has a massive goal of integrating sensors, IoT devices, IoT gateway, networks, cloud and applications. Summarized as sensor-to-app, each of them internally have a bunch of technologies that are powering them. The below mentioned diagram depicts the same.
Defining one course to cover all the technologies will be very overwhelming irrespective of the audience. Each technology mentioned above has its own detail oriented options. So taking one-size-fits all doesn’t work here. IoT courses need to be defined with specific target audience in mind.
Emertxe’s Approach towards IoT Course:
To make our life easier, let us break IoT into two areas at high level:
- Embedded IoT Development – Consist of sensors, device and gateway
- Network – The internet glue that connects Embedded and Application IoT
- Application IoT Development – Consist of cloud and applications
In Emertxe, our team of subject matter experts, have taken the view of Embedded IoT development and defined our course. It focuses on design and programming of Embedded IoT development and imparting integration knowledge of the Application IoT development. Here is the diagram that depicts our thought process.
Emertxe Embedded IoT Course Details:
In alignment with the thought process mentioned above, Emertxe’s Embedded IoT course is defined with the following topics.
IoT Architecture:
This will be an introductory module that will provide participants with an overall glimpse of IoT. Starting with fundamentals and history, this module will briefly introduce participants with various building blocks of IoT.
Setting up IoT Workflow:
In the module participants will be setting up end-to-end IoT workflow using Open Source (ex: Things Board) and commercial (ex: Amazon) IoT platforms. This will help participants to get hands-on exposure with all the building blocks in IoT Architecture and implement IoT use cases using various IoT platforms.
Advanced C Programming:
This is where participants will start deep diving into programming aspects. Usually you will get a lot of books to tell about what is programming and also how to write a program. But a very few tell you about how to translate a requirement into a working program, where more than 90% of participants struggle. This module will help you to come out of that and build functionally working C programs on your own.
Micro-controller Programming Using Arduino:
The module will give participants with hands-on programming experience with Arduino based micro-controllers. It will enable participants to set up, program and debug embedded applications running in Arduino platform. Participants will also become familiar with understanding board schematics, hardware interfacing and reading data-sheets. They will also learn basic communication protocols and build IoT applications using wired and wireless protocols (ex: Bluetooth).
Python Programming:
Python has become a “Swiss-army-knife” of programming language by becoming the most popular and versatile programming language for application development. This module will provide participants with hands-on development and debugging experience of Python, starting with basics. It will further deep dive into advanced aspects like Object Oriented programming, File handling, Package creation, Exception handling etc.
Building IoT Applications Using Raspberry Pi:
After learning Python you will move onto building applications using Raspberry Pi. Through Raspbian OS, participants will learn core Kernel concepts and apply them to build IoT gateway. This will also expose participants to a bunch of protocols (ex: MQTT, HTTP, XMPP, CoAP) using which you will be communicating to both IoT device and IoT Cloud platform. It will also provide hands-on exposure to Node-RED programming tool. With this participants will gain hands-on programming aspects of Embedded IoT by learning both IoT device and IoT gateways and protocols to connect them together. Now it’s time to move on to cloud integration modules.
IoT Cloud Infrastructure:
This module will give participants with cloud perspective of IoT. It will enable participants to choose right IoT platform, given so many options available in the market. This module will also give you hands-on exposure to configuring cloud platforms and derive right set of analytics from the cloud. It helps them to learn integration elements (ex: REST APIs) as well.
Performance and Security in IoT:
The eighth and the final module will expose participants with doing large scale IoT deployments and non-functional parameters (like performance and security). It will call out key parameters the design engineer should keep in mind while defining a real-time IoT solution.
Emertxe Embedded IoT – Skill Advantages:
All our education programs have one goal of imparting the latest skill in the best possible manner. Each of the above mentioned module will have a set of hands-on exercises, assignments and projects. By working on them, target audience will have a skill-set and demonstrated output which will help them to progress in their career. Please check out our ‘T’ model approach mentioned below and learn the best courses in IoT programming.
Conclusion:
IoT is a large paradigm with ambitious goal of integrating everything one can think of. From an engineer’s perspective it appears to overwhelming as it acts as an umbrella for many technologies.
This leads to them in a discovery journey of ‘What are the best courses in IoT programming?’ which leaves them more confused. In Emertxe we have divided IoT into logical chunks and approached it from an Embedded IoT perspective.
It will enable participants with design & programming aspects of Embedded System and configuration / integration aspects of Applications. By combining these two it makes building an end-to-end IoT solution possible!