Decentralized IoT with Wattsworth
John S. Donnal, Ryan S. McDowell, Michael D. M. Kutzer · 2020
Low cost sensors, powerful single board computers, and high bandwidth wireless networks have encouraged the proliferation of IoT systems to both measure and control our environment. Unfortunately those eager to realize the benefits of IoT are generally forced to choose between centralized commercial offerings or developing their own system from scratch. The former is cost effective but brittle, while the later is flexible but often impractical. Wattsworth is an open source platform for decentralized IoT providing users with the best of both worlds. Users can leverage a turn-key software stack while still retaining total control of their systems with no dependency on third party infrastructure. This paper presents three case studies showing how Wattsworth solves traditionally challenging IoT scenarios. In particular, these case studies illustrate how to collect data from proprietary sensors, design complex user interfaces, and coordinate diverse geographically distributed devices. Source code, full documentation, and installation media for Wattsworth are available at https://wattsworth.net.