For those of you who haven’t used it before, Fritzing is an open source application to make “electronics accessible”. For those who’ve done electronics work before, it’s similar to EAGLE CAD, but much simpler (and a lot more free). The Fritzing project does offer a lot more than just a piece of software, in fact they also do PCB fabrication, but for right now we’re just going to focus on how to start digitally designing some of those IoT projects you’ve been thinking about.

When you talk about the Internet Of Things, there are two major types of platforms. The first is hardware and while it’s growing, it’s fairly easy. The big hardware platforms are Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Particle, Intel (Edison), and MediaTek. There are, of course, many more, but that covers a majority of the hardware. However, since the hardware tends to be small, low power, and “dumb”, the IoT revolution will truly be built on software. As such that brings us to our second platform list, which is much bigger and much more confusing.

After last week’s Internet Of Things hack session, I became fascinated with all the fun IoT projects and technologies there are to play with. Everything you do, requires data to go into the cloud, so I figured I’d start there. In the hack series I learned how to push data into AWS Kinesis which is amazing, however it has its disadvantages. On the flip side there is the new AWS API Gateway which I also haven’t spent much time on, so that’s a perfect thing to learn. After some tinkering, I found that while AWS API Gateway -> Lambda -> DynamoDB might sound complicated, it’s actually quite easy.

Last Friday I spent the day at the AWS Popup Loft San Francisco. Just like when I was there two weeks ago, it was for an all day, hands on bootcamp. However, this most recent visit was much more exciting since we were learning about the Internet Of Things, the MediaTek LinkIt One and how to use AWS to process all the data. I left filled with good times, glorious ideas of IoT, and some goodies. A friend called it “Adult summer camp”, I call it “So awesome, why haven’t you gone yet?”