Making Heroes, the IoT Revolution Starts

— by Jane Ren

In history, times of great changes always brought us heroes. Whether it was social, political, technological, ideological or cultural changes, heroes were made in those moments and they in turn propelled the revolution forward. 

The most inspiring part of teaching a new programming language (TQL) in (a revolutionizing field) IoT is to discover and meet our own heroes and heroines. We would like to think that they possess the qualities of those who often go on to make history. 

It is the Industrial Revolution that brought about Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Florence Nightingale. It is the Internet Revolution that created Ray Tomlinson (father of email), Scott Fahlman (the first emoticon) and Jimmy Wales (founded Wikipedia). These heroes didn’t start the revolutions, but they harnessed the waves of change to open up new frontiers. 

Many of you are cynical. After all, no one really believes heroes are sitting among us or can even be ourselves. Heroes are read from history books… 

Neha Chaurasia and Samyak Bhalerao from Xoriant, two young engineers who had never touched IoT before, jumped bravely into the waves with us and within 3 weeks, made this IoT application (as well as the house and the movie).

You may ask – is this industrial strength? The answer is 'no', especially not the garage door part.

You may ask, is this scalable to real industries, real solutions? The answer is 'yes', similar systems are now powering smart cities live in multiple countries.

You may also ask, is this sophisticated enough? Well, a distributed application, running in parallel across three different environments (Raspberry Pi, Windows, and Linux), driving 2 types of sensors, 2 types of actuators and an end-user UI, sensing and responding to its environmental changes in a coordinated way – what do you say about that end-to-end in 3 weeks?

But it is not just the implementation of their IoT application that made me think about heroes.

A hero is one who does not hesitate to do what has never been done before.

All of us who are creating a new IoT way of application are defining what IoT exactly is by our own hands (not by going to conferences). Some may tell us – not feasible, not useful, or not “sellable”. A car was not “sellable” before there was any auto industry, but some heroes were still going to go ahead and make them.

For one thing, I had never seen a servo-motor-powered garage door until this video :)

And I broke out laughing when I noticed that the garage door was made of a cover paper from a binder notebook, so that with the turn of the servo motor the “door” would open on the hinges of the binder. This must have saved the two software engineers quite some carpentry and soldering time.

A hero is one who does not take “no” as an answer, not from anyone – no matter People or Things.

As Neha commented in the movie, “we’ve had some hard time with the hardware, and soft time with the software - TQL”. It’s probably going to be true for all the software engineers in our TQL IoT course.

We know it because Neha was bugging us in a couple of evenings until midnight. And she did not hide her frustrations, not until the devices were set and drivers were running right. 

A hero is one who instills passion into his pursuit.

This mid-term project never required building a physical house, with brick walls, windows and driveways. Looking at the intricate set up there, a software guy would ask – is this necessary?

No, it may not be. It may not be necessary to everyone. But it mattered to these two engineers, because that was the vision they set out for themselves: the smart home, not the smart home software. Staying committed to materializing whatever vision they held gave them the energy to go through the late night frustrations, if not better lines of code.

As software engineers we often tell ourselves the story that our job stops where the product manager picks up. That’s no longer true in IoT. The physical world of things, along with the people and the business that drive them, is now part of our software, and hence the world is part of our software. So put your vision in there. 

A hero is one who uses her story to inspire others.

This movie coming as another surprise to me from our TQL classes (after this other video), I asked Neha – who was the artistic director (did you notice the cinematography used)?

She said, we made it ourselves, because our colleagues kept coming by and asking us what we were doing, so we thought we’d make a movie to explain to them.

Movie is one way of story telling. Stories can be told from lines of code as well, as long as we wish to share. Stories are told in words, in photos and in electronic bits. Very often, it is the stories being told from people to people that make cultures, progresses, and revolutions.

To us, teaching TQL is also about discovering heroes. These heroes are being made, right at this moment, by the IoT Revolution. They are around us.