If you’ve ever entered Tomorrowland at Disney World, you’ve seen the Carousel of Progress. Inside is an animatronic show that debuted at the 1964 World’s Fair, moving to its current location in the 1970s. It follows the story of a family as their world evolves through technology. This family traverses several decades of advances, from manual to electric appliances, music recordings and the like. In the final scene, a “smart” oven overhears a video game score, interprets it as a temperature setting and burns the Christmas turkey. Back in 1964, this vision of the future where appliances could respond to voice commands seemed nearly impossible. And yet here we sit, several decades into the 21st century, surrounded by these “future” smart technologies.
Today’s world has moved beyond this animatronic future into one where devices don’t just respond to needs, but predict them. This is the world of IoT, or Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is simply a concept – one where all the devices with which we interact connect wirelessly to the internet to improve their efficiency, safety, or user experience. These devices can be consumer in nature or part of a business or manufacturing process.
Key Takeaways
- The IoT Architecture: Modern IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems rely on a four-tier framework: data-generating sensors, local wireless connectivity, cloud applications, and automated control endpoints.
- From Reactive to Predictive: Rather than simply reporting current metrics, IIoT systems analyze continuous data streams to predict structural fatigue, material depletion, and machine maintenance needs before failures occur.
- Upgraded Consumer Experience: Smart kitchen appliances like coffeemakers and ovens enhance the user experience by automating tasks and reducing “mental load”.
- Industrial Scale Monitoring: In commercial applications, wireless load cells replace cumbersome cabling, enabling real-time weight and tension telemetry across remote job sites, silos, and cranes.
- Predictive Maintenance ROI: Integrating wireless sensors into industrial machinery yields a high return on investment by preventing catastrophic downtime and eliminating manual inspection bottlenecks.
The Anatomy of an IoT System
The goal of every IoT system is to collect environmental or system usage data to send it to an application. The application then makes intelligent decisions based on that data, then takes some action or provides some instruction to a device that ameliorates conditions at the point of data collection.
The following block diagram illustrates a typical IoT implementation:
Sensors: The Data Source
Sensors are the root of an IoT architecture. They generate the core of an IoT system’s value: data. This data can be anything measurable such as weight, temperature, pressure, moisture, or usage; the list of data categories can be quite long. Once generated, this data can be applied in many ways depending on the application that processes it.
Connectivity: The Communication Tradeoff
This block in the diagram actually represents a wireless system rather than a single physical entity. This system could be a low power, local area network (LPLAN), standard wireless technology, WiFi, satellite or Bluetooth. Other technologies also exist but are less common. The choice depends on the needed tradeoff among these factors: range, bandwidth, and power consumption.
Applications: The Data-Based Functionality
IoT applications process collected data in order to determine a desired course of action. For example, they can determine if the data falls within a desired range (e.g., soil moisture in an agricultural setting). If it does not, the application messages a user interface or system; this system in turn takes corrective action (e.g., turn on an irrigation system).
User Interface/Endpoint: The Human Interpreter
This block represents either a user interface or receiving system that processes instructions from the application. It is often co-located with or near the sensors.
Example of an IoT System: The Smart Kitchen
Let’s think back to the kitchen in the Carousel of Progress. We’ve been interacting with these features for several years now, with our Alexas and Nest Hubs. Let’s add a little IoT functionality by adding sensors to our appliances and connecting them to our home WiFi. Here we look at two appliances: the coffeemaker and the star of Disney’s show, the oven.
The Smart Coffeemaker
For many of us, one of the most important appliances in our homes is our coffeemaker. For the java-addicts among us, this machine is vital for our brains to come alive each morning. And even more important are the coffee beans it extracts its magic from. The mere thought of running out of them motivates the coffee-dependent to take up valuable pantry space with an ample stash. The alternative is to make last-minute, sometimes inconvenient grocery store visits to ensure mornings run smoothly.
This necessity became the mother of the invention behind Bottomless, a Seattle-based company that was originally retail coffee distributor. When you sign up for their service, Bottomless sends you not just the coffee, but a small scale. Instructions direct you to connect the scale to WiFi and then store your coffee container on its platform.
The connected device reports the declining weight to an application. This application then learns the average rate of diminishing supply, and predicts approximately when your coffee will run out. This date’s approach triggers an automatic shipment of the customer’s previous selection.
Realizing their core value was not just in coffee, but in automated ordering, Bottomless has since changed its business model. The company has established partnerships to expand its offering of pantry staples.
In this way, IoT technology has improved the coffee connoisseur’s inventory tracking. The product arrives just in time without a grocery store adventure; the shipment is triggered by actual consumption rather than by a schedule.
The Smart Oven
IoT has advanced the conventional oven in the Disney attraction beyond simple voice recognition. WiFi-connected smart ovens use a combination of sensors, instructions from apps and phone- or tablet-based user interfaces to create the perfect meal. For example, some use cameras to allow an app to identify the food placed in the unit. This, combined with a user-selected recipe, some weight, temperature and moisture sensors, allows the oven to tailor its temperature and cook time automatically to create that perfect roast.
In the past, many of these features existed mostly in countertop ovens. Since this article was originally published, smart built in wall ovens have joined the list of options. The breadth of options are featured in the Popular Science article, “The best smart ovens, tested and reviewed”.
The Industrial IoT (IIoT): Improving Business ROI Through Organization-Wide Efficiency
While smart coffeemakers and connected ovens exemplify how the IoT can optimize everyday consumer experiences, a larger economic driver of the Internet of Things is the Industrial IoT (IIoT).
In heavy manufacturing, civil engineering, and remote logistics, running miles of measurement cabling to traditional wired strain gauges is often cost-prohibitive or made impossible by topology. By connecting precision sensors to low-power wireless nodes, an IIoT architecture can stream live weight, tension, and structural load data directly to cloud-based dashboards, giving engineers enterprise-wide operational intelligence.
Beyond operational efficiency, the benefits of the IIoT are organization-wide:
- Automated Inventory Management & Smart Silos: In the same way that Bottomless’s scale manages personal coffee inventory, large industrial scales can add efficiency to the acquisition and storage of commercial raw materials. Wireless data from storage hoppers, agricultural silos, and liquid tanks inform connected applications that analyze depletion rates, enabling automated reordering through enterprise ERP systems. This sensor-driven, just-in-time warehousing eliminates manual inventory checks, avoids production downtime, saves warehouse square-footage and increases efficiency.
- Predictive Maintenance & Asset Monitoring: As described in the article Advantages and Applications of Wireless Load Cells, real-time torque and load transducers monitor rotating shafts, bearing blocks, and industrial presses. Cloud-connected apps continuously monitor this data for loading anomalies that may indicate mechanical wear or alignment degradation well before a catastrophic breakdown may occur. Given the cost of such breakdowns, the ROI over traditional scheduled maintenance is clear.
- Real-Time Structural Health & Safety: Similarly to predictive maintenance applications, wireless strain nodes and tension links mounted on overhead cranes, temporary scaffolding, guyed towers, and bridge girders are able to continuously stream axial stress data. This can automatically trigger alarms or automatic shutoffs if dynamic shock loads, side loads, or other concerning forces exceed safe operating thresholds (see Improving the Safety of Scaffolding Using Sensors).
- Remote Quality Control & Product Testing: Embedded load buttons or torque transducers in remote field equipment/automated test rigs can stream live force data to centralized engineering centers. This facilitates continuous product testing and remote compliance verification, saving on-location monitoring and expediting test conclusions.
Modern IIoT solutions consider these applications collectively. Likewise, they account for existing infrastructure and modernization investments. By parsing collected data to applications spanning multiple business dimensions, while leveraging existing infrastructure and designing for scalability, IIoT solutions can simultaneously address operational efficiency and other data-driven applications cost-effectively. This continues to drive IIoT adoption rates.
Conclusions
Each scene in the Carousel of Progress shows us the latest innovations of that generation and how they improve the lives of its inhabitants. The Internet of Things is just the next scene in our real-life version of that carousel. It represents a fundamental shift in how physical infrastructure and industrial processes are monitored, managed, and optimized. At the root of every successful IoT deployment is reliable, high-precision data collection.
Whether you are modernizing an automated inventory system or setting up remote structural health monitoring, reliable telemetry starts at the sensor node. By pairing robust mechanical transducers with long-range telemetry modules, Tacuna System’s load cell offerings and wireless solutions provide the precision foundation required for modern industrial IoT deployments.
Sources and Further Reading
[1] PTC Inc., The State of Industrial Internet of Things: Spotlight on Operational Effectiveness.
[2] Leverege, IoT 101: An Introduction to the Internet of Things.
[3] IoT For All, IoT Applications in Weighing and Loading.
[4] IoT For All, Empowering Predictive Maintenance With IoT Remote Monitoring
[5] U.S. Department of Energy, Operations & Maintenance Best Practices Guide: Release 3.0
