🔗 Further content

📥 Downloads & Samples

Source code and accompanying materials for the book.

Video 1 Reflow Solder Description: <- klick

Video 2 AIoT Board initial setup: <- klick

Video 3 Installalation MSVSCode und ESP_IDF. Flashen Experimentier Board: <- klick

📘 Detailed IoT Book Table of Contents

(Subject to change)

📘 Preface – AIoT Workshop, Volume 1

The development of modern IoT and AIoT systems often begins today with ready-made modules, example code, and cloud services. This enables rapid results — but it frequently obscures what is actually happening underneath.

As a result, problems tend to appear later: unstable hardware, difficult-to-explain faults, inefficient designs, or products that fail to make the transition from a working demonstrator to reliable long-term operation.

This book therefore deliberately takes a different approach.

Volume 1 of the AIoT Workshop begins before actual product development starts.
We begin with fundamental electrical relationships, with the breadboard as a learning tool, with power supply concepts and schematic diagrams — and from there we gradually develop a systemic understanding of hardware.

The breadboard is used strictly as a didactic instrument.
At a defined point, we leave it behind and consistently transition to a custom experimenter board that is analyzed, assembled, soldered, commissioned, and professionally integrated on the software side.

This transition is not a stylistic break — it is part of the concept:
from assembling individual circuits toward structured, production-ready hardware and software development.

Volume 1 does not end with experimentation. It concludes with a fully networked, energy-optimized, OTA-capable IoT node featuring a clear architecture, defined state model, and remote maintainability.

This book addresses two audiences simultaneously:

• Beginners who want to understand how modern embedded and IoT systems truly work
• Professional developers, startups, and technical teams who want to strengthen their foundations, make better architectural decisions, and avoid common mistakes early on

Both groups benefit from the same principle:
Understand relationships — not just execute recipes.

All projects in this volume are practice-oriented. They deliberately highlight limitations, typical failure modes, and the differences between a learning setup, an experimenter board, a prototype, and a product-ready solution. Supplementary Engineering Notes place each topic into a professional context and build the bridge toward later product development.

Volume 1 is neither a quick-start guide nor merely a reference manual.
It forms the technical foundation of the entire AIoT Workshop series.

Anyone who works through this volume will be able to read and evaluate circuits, interpret hardware designs, understand PCB layouts, structure embedded software commissioning, reliably network IoT devices, control them via MQTT, update them over the air, and will therefore be ideally prepared for the advanced topics of the subsequent volumes.

🎯 Purpose and Positioning – Volume 1

Volume 1 establishes the technical foundation for all subsequent AIoT topics.

After completing this volume, the reader will be able to:

• Understand and evaluate fundamental circuits
• Analyze and logically explain schematics
• View hardware as an interconnected system
• Comprehend the layout principles of real PCBs
• Systematically commission a custom experimenter board
• Develop and debug embedded software in a structured way
• Set up MQTT-based communication
• Perform remote OTA updates
• Implement energy-optimized deep-sleep cycles
• Confidently distinguish between experimenter board, prototype, and product

Volume 1 therefore teaches not only how something works, but why it is designed that way — and which architectural decisions remain sustainable in the long term.

🧭 Position Within the AIoT Workshop Series

The AIoT Workshop is designed as a five-part, progressively structured series:

• Volume 1: Hardware and IoT Fundamentals
• Volume 2: Energy, Security, Scaling, and Field Operation
• Volume 3: Edge AI, Sensor Fusion, Audio, and Vision
• Volume 4: Speech and Face Recognition, Multimodal AIoT Systems
• Volume 5: Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and AIoT Integration

Volume 1 is intentionally hardware-centric.

Topics such as artificial intelligence, speech processing, image analysis, or autonomous systems are not yet explored in depth here. Instead, we establish the prerequisites that allow these technologies to be deployed later in a stable, efficient, and responsible manner.

An AIoT system is only as strong as its foundation.

That foundation is not created in the cloud and not in model training —
it is created through clean hardware design, clear architecture, structured embedded software, and robust system integration.

👥 Who Is Volume 1 For?

• Beginners who want to truly understand embedded and IoT systems
• Makers who want to move from tinkering to systematic development
• Students and academic courses that aim to connect theory and practice
• Startups and development teams that need solid foundations for their own products

Volume 1 is structured so that beginners are guided step by step, while professionals can selectively use architecture and engineering sections for deeper insight.