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IoT Application Layers
In IoT World, we are starting from analog world and connecting to digital cloud and hence multiple layers play the role in the middle.
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In general, an IoT application (solution) can be divided into three segments:
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1. Sensors
Sensors or Actuators
Sensors and actuators are the physical touch points to the physical world. They come in two categories - Analog and Digital. Analog sensors need electronics to convert analog signals to digital output. Digital Sensors have this electronics as part of the sensor.
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/analog-vs-digital2.
MCUs
Signal or data coming from sensors and actuators often cannot be interpreted and utilized directly by the operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) running on modern general purpose computers. Most modern computers's operating systems support serial interfaces such as Bluetooth, USB, DB9, but not low level patterns used by sensors and actuators, such as SPI, I2C, and UART.
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However, as discussed in Thing Categories, many devices and machines have their own controller built inside. These controllers perform similar functions to the MCUs. Therefore, devices and machines are often able to communicate at a higher level protocol accepted by your operating system. When you have an IoT solution with such devices and machines, you may not need separate MCUs.
3. Applications
Gateways
The applications starts from programs that run on general purpose computing devices. They don't have to be your computer. They can be a gateway, a laptop, or a server. For that matter, the Raspberry Pi is also a general purpose computer and is where the IoT application can start.
Gateways
In In general, we call the general purpose computers that are deployed "locally" (i.e. close to the sensors, devices and machines) "gateways". Gateways are often used to take advantage of range-limited protocols such as ZigBee, Lora, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Serial.
Usually, gateways are more lightweight, small foot-print, and small-sized computers. For example, the Raspberry Pi, the Intel Stick and Cisco IoT Gateways. Some "gateways" get bigger and more powerful, and we call them "appliances".
Clouds
We call the computers that gets the IoT data only from IP protocols (and hence whose physical location does not matter) the "clouds". Cloud can be private (in enterprise datacenter) or public (AWS).
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How TQL runs in IoT Solutions
The TQLEngine is a peer-to-peer enabled middleware and application container. Because of its small footprint, it can run on any range of computers starting from most gateway type of devices to large clouds. For example, RaspberryPi, your laptop, servers, and on public/private clouds. IoT applications written in TQL can often be distributed across gateways and clouds. However, because TQLEngine requires JVM to run, it does not run on MCUs.
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