Please Clarify This IoT Thing!

With a lot of talk about all this IoT stuff, you must ask: how do I justify or get excited about connecting my toaster to my refrigerator or my toilet to the internet!? So much talk about things that don’t seem to be useful- maybe we should all come up with the IoUT – internet of useful things!!!!

Digressing a bit here, but honestly, we do have a connected weather station on top of our building that has a lot of parts we sell that enable a connection to the internet. You can see a camera view from the top of our building and see our temperature in northern Minnesota (try checking that in January and you will see how cold it really gets here ☺). Oh, and there is a product selector for our IoT products should you want to pursue our parts.

The current configuration of the weather center structure was upgraded to three solar panels charging multiple sealed lead acid batteries, and multiple sensor nodes monitoring the temperature, light, wind speed, battery, and solar voltages.

Anyway, what I get frazzled about, and what seems to be a bit of a misnomer in the industry, is the terminology used when discussing things connecting to the internet - i.e., IoT, IIoT, Industry 4.0, Industrie 4.0 and M2M.

In our world as a distributor, we can define these terms simply:

IoT = Internet of Things (coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999) - Connecting a vehicle, machine, product, or device to the internet. This can be for controlling something or for obtaining information about something and retrieving the information sent from the internet to the original part and/or another device. IoT is vast in scope and includes many industries and applications. There is an organization called IoTC that helps bring companies together and solve the connecting problems.

IIoT = The Industrial Internet of Things - IoT that is specific to industrial settings, like factories, oil and gas rigs and refineries, mines, etc. High reliability and operation under harsh and hazardous conditions are a requirement. A detailed organization that helps sort out terms around IIoT is the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).

Industry 4.0 (Industrie 4.0) - Sometimes misunderstood as IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), this term is mainly used in Germany to describe the government initiative to move their factories through the next (fourth) wave of the industrial revolution. The underlying concept of Industrie 4.0 is to connect embedded systems and smart production facilities to generate a digital convergence between industry, business and internal functions and processes. It emphasizes the connection of cyber-physical systems (a combination of intelligent software with hardware).^[i]

M2M = Machine to Machine communications (an older term used before IoT). Where devices, machines and or vehicles communicate amongst themselves without human intervention.

Conclusion: Everything listed above is all under the umbrella of creating the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Keep an eye out for the evolution and advancement of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – it could help create the Fifth Industrial Revolution.

^[i] sourced from http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3054921