IoT Course

Lesson 1 • Challenges and Limitations of IoT

Addresses scalability, interoperability, power, and security constraints inherent to IoT. Sets realistic expectations before students design their own systems.

Lesson 2 • Core IoT Architecture Layers

Explains the perception, network, and application layers of IoT architecture. Students map real devices to each architectural layer.

Lesson 3 • IoT Use Cases Across Industries

Surveys smart home, industrial, healthcare, and agriculture IoT applications. Grounds abstract concepts in concrete, real-world deployment scenarios.

Lesson 4 • Defining IoT and Its Scope

Covers the definition, history, and boundaries of IoT as a technology domain. Provides the conceptual baseline for all subsequent chapters.

Lesson 1 • Interfacing Sensors with Edge Devices

Covers GPIO, I2C, SPI, and UART protocols for connecting sensors to edge hardware. Students wire and program basic sensor-to-device circuits.

Lesson 2 • Signal Conditioning and Analog-to-Digital Conversion

Teaches amplification, filtering, and ADC processes that convert raw sensor signals to usable data. Directly supports accurate data acquisition in later chapters.

Lesson 3 • Microcontrollers and Single-Board Computers

Compares microcontroller units and single-board computers for edge processing tasks. Students match hardware platforms to computational and power constraints.

Lesson 4 • Actuator Types and Control Mechanisms

Explains motors, relays, solenoids, and displays as output devices in IoT systems. Students connect actuator selection to system response requirements.

Lesson 1 • Network Topology and Gateway Design

Explains star, mesh, and hybrid topologies and the role of IoT gateways. Students design network layouts that balance reliability, cost, and scalability.

Lesson 2 • Short-Range Wireless Protocols

Examines Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Wi-Fi for local device communication. Students compare range, power, and throughput trade-offs for each protocol.

Lesson 3 • Long-Range and Wide-Area Protocols

Covers LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and LTE-M for geographically distributed deployments. Students evaluate coverage, data rate, and cost for each wide-area option.

Lesson 4 • Application-Layer Messaging Protocols

Teaches MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, and HTTP/REST for device-to-cloud data exchange. Students implement publish-subscribe and request-response messaging patterns.

Lesson 1 • Real-Time Event Detection at the Edge

Covers rule engines and lightweight inference for detecting events locally without cloud round-trips. Directly enables low-latency responses in time-critical IoT applications.

Lesson 2 • Data Acquisition Fundamentals

Covers sampling strategies, data formats, and timestamping for reliable sensor data collection. Establishes the data quality baseline required for all downstream processing.

Lesson 3 • Edge Filtering and Preprocessing

Teaches noise filtering, outlier removal, and normalization applied at the edge device. Reduces erroneous data before it propagates to cloud storage or analytics.

Lesson 4 • Edge Computing Frameworks

Introduces lightweight edge runtimes and containerisation for deploying logic on edge nodes. Students deploy a simple processing pipeline to an edge device.

Lesson 1 • Data Visualization and Dashboards

Covers chart types, dashboard design principles, and alerting for IoT operational data. Students build an interactive dashboard displaying live and historical sensor metrics.

Lesson 2 • IoT Cloud Platform Architecture

Explains device registries, message brokers, and data pipelines within cloud IoT platforms. Students map platform components to the architectural layers learned earlier.

Lesson 3 • Device Connectivity and Management

Covers device authentication, over-the-air updates, and remote configuration via cloud consoles. Students register and manage a fleet of simulated devices.

Lesson 4 • Stream Processing and Real-Time Analytics

Teaches windowed aggregations, filtering, and enrichment on live IoT data streams. Students build a streaming pipeline that produces real-time KPIs from sensor feeds.

Lesson 1 • Network Security for IoT

Teaches TLS/DTLS encryption, network segmentation, and VPN tunnelling for IoT traffic. Students configure encrypted communication between a device and a cloud endpoint.

Lesson 2 • IoT Threat Landscape

Surveys attack vectors including device tampering, network interception, and cloud breaches. Motivates security-first design by connecting threats to real-world incident impacts.

Lesson 3 • Device-Level Security Measures

Covers secure boot, hardware security modules, and firmware signing for endpoint protection. Students apply device hardening techniques to a reference hardware platform.

Lesson 4 • Privacy by Design and Compliance

Addresses data minimisation, consent management, and regulatory compliance principles for IoT. Students audit a sample system against a privacy-by-design framework.

Lesson 1 • Middleware and Message Brokers

Explains the role of middleware and enterprise message brokers in decoupling IoT producers from consumers. Students configure a broker to route messages between heterogeneous devices.

Lesson 2 • Enterprise System Integration

Covers integration with ERP, CRM, and SCADA systems using connectors and ETL pipelines. Students connect a simulated IoT data stream to an enterprise data store.

Lesson 3 • Testing and Validating Integrations

Teaches contract testing, end-to-end integration testing, and simulation for IoT pipelines. Students write and execute tests that verify data integrity across system boundaries.

Lesson 4 • API Design for IoT Integration

Teaches RESTful and event-driven API design patterns for exposing IoT data to external systems. Students design and document an IoT API following best practices.

Lesson 1 • Monitoring, Observability, and Maintenance

Covers metrics, logs, traces, and predictive maintenance strategies for live IoT deployments. Students configure an observability stack for a deployed IoT solution.

Lesson 2 • Deployment Planning and Provisioning

Teaches infrastructure-as-code, device provisioning workflows, and rollout strategies for IoT fleets. Students automate the provisioning of a multi-device deployment.

Lesson 3 • System Architecture and Component Selection

Covers architecture decision records, component trade-off analysis, and reference architectures for IoT. Students produce an architecture diagram with justified component choices.

Lesson 4 • Requirements Analysis for IoT Projects

Guides structured elicitation of functional, non-functional, and constraint requirements for IoT systems. Students produce a requirements specification for a capstone IoT project.