An Intern's Take on the Internet of Things

Let’s say I’m driving home from a long work day in July, and I already know my house is going to be hot due to the recent heatwave. Once I make it inside, I go straight for the AC unit and drop the temperature as low as possible. About 15 minutes later, I finally start to feel the house cooling down.

I won’t have to do this today, though, because I recently installed the Nest Smart Thermostat in my home and its accompanying app on my phone. Now, I can lower the temperature at home before I even leave the office, making sure it’s perfect the minute I step through my front door. Smart thermostats can do more than just let me remotely change the temperature; they can monitor my preferences and will even auto-adjust depending on the time of day. By using sensors and connecting to my iPhone’s location, they can also know when I’m away from home and will change the temperature to a level that’s more eco--and wallet--friendly.

Smart thermostats are just one small example of the Internet of Things, a concept coined way back in 1999 that describes the connectivity of devices to the internet, each other, and their user.  The Internet of Things (IoT) has five main categories of “smart” physical products that are inter-networked together: smart wearables, smart homes, smart cities, smart environment, and smart enterprises. The devices in these categories range from collecting retail consumer data to better target shoppers to monitoring the acidity of the soil in a farmer’s crops.

 Recently, the IoT industry has been producing a more interactive generation of products that are focused on action instead of data gathering and sensing. This means more self-parking cars, devices like Amazon’s Echo, and inventive health monitors for both adults and children (check out Owlet’s baby monitoring socks). Normally, all of these innovative designs would be interesting, but very foreign to me. I would only hear about these products once they were ready for commercial use, without knowing what makes any of them possible on the inside. I wouldn’t think about how companies were creating parallel processing MCU chips to help streamline command executions, or that wireless protocols like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are at the foundation of IoT. At their simplest functions, Wi-Fi connects devices to the Cloud/internet, while Bluetooth connects devices to each other.

However, I’m finally taking a look under the hood of this revolutionary phenomenon and understanding how tech plays a role thanks to my internship at Cypress Semiconductor, the leader in wireless connectivity technologies for the IoT. Cypress established leadership in this space with the acquisition of Broadcom’s IoT business in July 2016. Since then, they have been at the forefront of IoT design with products spanning across the consumer, industrial, and automotive markets. Cypress is successfully making chips that are smaller, consume less power, and yet have more performance capacity than ever before. Consider Cypress’ new PSoC 6 BLE MCU, RS (136-7817) announced at Embedded World 2017, which is the lowest power and most flexible MCU for IoT in the industry. PSoC 6 is the solution for extending battery life in portable devices without compromising security or performance quality.

The IoT industry is largely made up of uncharted territory in terms of design and function, which leads to new challenges arising. Fortunately, Cypress’ entire business model is built not only around problem solving, but being excited to do it. While at Cypress, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from people across departments, and I can attest to the forward-thinking and innovative mindset that the company advertises. Cypress is committed to solving its customers’ problems, whether a current roadblock or an unforeseen issue in the future. “That’s just the way it is” isn’t a phrase you would ever hear in these halls, especially in terms of IoT. There’s always a way to innovate and move forward.

Not everyone is as eager for product connectivity, however. The main argument opposing IoT is that it’s unnecessary and is making us reliant on technologies to do everyday things like control our thermostats and wash our clothes. This argument boasts a fair point: most of these technologies (save some of the healthcare innovations) aren’t life-changing products that we need to own. In the same vein, I don’t need Find My iPhone’s location services and connection to the Cloud to help me find where I last left my phone. Still, I much prefer following the pings to my phone’s exact location instead of tearing apart the living room when it was in the kitchen all along. In ten years, we might look back on our lives today and think, How could I have ever lived without my smart home, car, or city? It could be just like looking back ten years ago today and wondering how we survived a day without our iPhones and Netflix accounts. Yet, even the iPhone had skeptics questioning its usefulness at its beginning.

The IoT movement, with problem-solving wireless connectivity companies such as Cypress at the forefront, has only just begun to hit its stride in terms of development and proliferation. Still, the goals for IoT companies aren’t as life-altering as you might think. A lot of companies want to seamlessly connect devices to your life, making trivial activities (like checking if you’re out of milk) a thing of the past. Products are being designed to be as helpful, intuitive, and user-friendly as possible; ideally freeing up your time. The application of the Internet of Things in your everyday life is all about making the products you already own smarter and making it easier for you to interact with them. It’s still your life, just a little better.