Companies that struggle with IoT product development typically cite high scalability costs, technical challenges, and vague ROI perspectives as the key reasons for IoT project failure.

As a startup looking to create an IoT solution, you could avoid most of these challenges by carefully planning your IoT pilot in advance.

Here’s where our guide to IoT solution development comes in useful.
Understanding IoT Product Development

To help you build an IoT device and the accompanying software ecosystem in a risk-free way, we’re starting an article series that dives into the Internet of Things technologies and IoT product development best practices.

This time, we’ll focus on the Internet of Things definition, architecture, and stages your connected product goes through before hitting the shelves.
What Is an IoT Product Exactly?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects connected to the Internet and/or each other over a wired or wireless network.

The “things” term may apply to both electronic web development Plymouth devices, such as fitness trackers, and non-electronic objects enhanced with sensors and lightweight control gadgets (think smart curtains operated via a relay and mobile app).

There are two types of IoT solutions you could create:

Sensing devices, which measure information on the surrounding environment and convert it into digital signals
Actuating devices, which receive digital signals from the network and act upon them

These devices can talk to the nodes within an IoT ecosystem (i.e., peer-to-peer communication), connect to the network via a gateway, or establish gateway-less connections.
What Does an IoT Solution Architecture Look Like?

To create an IoT device or non-electronic gadget scavenging and acting on environmental data, it is essential to understand how connected solutions function under the hood.