Design and Development of RV-IoT Board - Prototyping Platform for Designing IoT Projects

An All-In-One IoT board offers benefits such as a simplified and convenient development platform. It integrates various hardware components on a single board, reduces the physical footprint, accelerates prototyping, and ensures compatibility and reliability of integrated parts. These boards are power-efficient, cost-effective in the long run, and facilitate easier debugging and troubleshooting. They are made for rapid iterative development, making them ideal for educational purposes whilst catering to a diverse range of IoT project needs. Many industries such as Home Automation, Energy, Healthcare, Retail and Agriculture are extensively using embedded systems. Though different industries have different needs, most embedded system projects rely on using sensors to obtain inputs, the microcontroller for computations and actuators to provide outputs. With this in mind, a plethora of parts along with an ESP-32 microcontroller were used in the proposed board. As the primary purpose of the board is for education and prototyping, it is predicted that certain parts will suffer frequent damage and will need replacing. Therefore, the part selection process placed emphasis on cost-effectiveness, robustness, and market availability of parts. The design process was focused on increasing the board's robustness and providing a plug-and-play system. In addition, opto-isolators were used to protect the board from high voltage inputs. With inputs from industry professionals, the proposed design features essential components such as SD card interface for storage, a TFT touchscreen display, Audio modules, keypad input, an array of sensors, and motor control interfaces. Using these, prototype projects such as cloud data loggers, remote-controlled audio players, vending machines, and automated irrigation systems were developed in laboratory environments.