As far as technical challenges go, the Internet of Things is as tough as it gets: The scale is large: everything is huge. The power is low: there is almost none of it available. Wireless is weird: it keeps changing and it wasn’t very nice to begin with. Today we look at these fundamental problems that every IoT platform must face and how we solve them in the Thingsquare IoT platform. Scale: When everything is large, all bets are off Many IoT deployments involve hundreds or thousands of individual devices. With large numbers of devices, even problems that normally would be unlikely to occur, are likely to occur. Large networks are difficult to monitor in the field. But are even more challenging to work with during development. At Thingsquare, we use these categories when we talk about development of IoT networks: Developer scale: 1-2 devices. When you have 1 or 2 wireless devices in front of you, it is relatively easy to understand what they are doing. You can add printouts or LEDs that blink when things happen, and as a developer, you can feel confident that you are in control. It is even possible to stop the execution of the software on one of the devices and single-step the program. Desktop scale: 2-5 devices. At this stage you can no longer control each device on its own, but you must treat them like a unit. They are still few enough to be able to monitor though, but you will have to use things like visually blink LEDs to allow you to see what is going on with them. Office scale: 5-10 devices. Now you have run out of space to fit the devices on a single desk and must spread them out over an area that begins to become difficult to monitor. And programming them with a new program starts to be a practical challenge, because you will have to physically connect and disconnect each device to the flash programmer. Floor scale: 10-100 devices. It now begins to be difficult to find space for all your devices in a single office and you will need to spread out over an entir
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