Practical Introduction to IoT Architectures

This book presents the fundamental concepts and design principles behind low-power IoT architectures.

It is organized into two complementary parts that focus on both functional foundations and communication technologies, offering readers a clear and progressive learning path from basic concepts to complete IoT systems.

The content is built around a series of hands-on laboratories, carefully designed to help readers move from theory to practice. Instead of only describing technologies, the book enables readers to experiment, build, test, and understand real IoT solutions.

This practical approach makes the book especially suitable for students, educators, and engineers who want to gain real-world experience with IoT systems.

The labs begin with sensors and displays on IoT development boards, demonstrating how data is acquired and processed locally.

Readers then explore wireless communication using Wi-Fi, enabling data exchange between IoT devices as well as between devices and remote IoT servers.

Building on this foundation, the book introduces long-range communication using LoRa radio links, which are well suited for low-power, wide-area IoT deployments such as smart cities, environmental monitoring, and agriculture.

Finally, the book presents LoRa-WiFi gateways, which bridge long-distance LoRa networks to cloud-based IoT platforms such as MQTT brokers and ThingSpeak servers, allowing readers to design complete end-to-end IoT systems.

All experiments are based on the Heltec WiFi LoRa V2 IoT board together with a custom-designed IoT DevKit, ensuring consistency and reproducibility.

For motivated users and educators, we also provide the Gerber files for both the main DevKit board and the cover board, enabling customization, fabrication, and deeper hardware exploration.