Design Of IoT Platform Based On Wi-Fi SoC

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in the new generation of information technology. It is the development and expansion of Internet. More and more terminals are being integrated into the huge network continually. The IoT is slowly changing our surrounding environment as well as the way of our life and work. It not only brings many conveniences to us, but also provides a number of development opportunities and technical challenges for the electronics industry.The existed IoT platforms have some characteristics that including closed technology, bloated system, complex implementation, difficult to development and high cost. These disadvantages are not conducive to rapidly develop of the Internet products. Therefore, we launched the NodeMCU open source project, and designed a rapid development IoT platform that based on the Wi-Fi system on Chip (SoC), and it was designed using the thinking and the development way of Internet. In this paper, we not only designed a development board for developers, but also designed a Wi-Fi SoC module which could be embedded into the specific IoT products. On our IoT development platform, the hardware could be developed just by using the Lua programming language. It could make Internet related engineers easily and directly developing hardware on our platform, even if they have no experience in hardware development. Besides, it could save the human resources for the enterprise, improve the efficiency of development and achieve the purpose of rapid development. More importantly, both our hardware and software were open source. This would make the hardware manufacturers quickly integrate the technology into the specific products, and achieved the goal of rapid production.In this paper, both the hardware and the software of the IoT platform was presented, and describes the embedded hardware, software, and cloud respectively. The embedded hardware was the core technology in this design. The detailed design relevant to both the Wi-Fi SoC module and the development board was introduced, and the embedded software with the implementation of Lua interpreter was also described. The IoT Platform application software was an important part of the IoT platform. Here the design and implementation were explained in detail separately from production, testing and the IoT function demo software. The cloud application was the important support of the IoT platform. The building process and the structure of the cloud was finally demonstrated.The development board and the Wi-Fi SoC modules in this paper had already passed the CE and FCC certification. Furthermore, our design had been applied in many products. The hardware and software development platform based on the Wi-Fi SoC had also gained wide attention, such as hardware manufacturers, open source projects and kickstarter projects. The NodeUSB project, the ijWatch smart watch and the smart Button project were developed by our IoT platform. Due to openness of this IoT platform, more and more developers and manufacturers joining in the development project.