Chapter 1: Connected embedded systems

Sections

• 1.1 What a connected embedded system is: sensing, acting, communicating, the Information Value Loop, multisensory perception, and physical constraints.
• 1.2 The IoT, IIoT, and Physical AI landscape: origins and three generations of IoT, the smart-home case study, the four phases of IIoT and the outcome economy, and Physical AI.
• 1.3 The two tiers: microcontroller leaf nodes and Linux gateways: why mainline Embedded Linux sits on the gateway, why Zephyr RTOS sits on the leaf, and their shared Devicetree/Kconfig/socket DNA.
• 1.4 Edge, fog, and cloud: where processing happens: fog control and data planes, the Cloud–Edge–IoT computing continuum, and the horizontal Internet of Collaborating Things (IoCT).
• 1.5 Processor families: ESP32, Arm Cortex-M, and Arm Cortex-A: Xtensa and RISC-V in the ESP32 family, Arm Cortex-A72/A76 in the Raspberry Pi 4/5, industrial Compute Modules, and heterogeneous AMP SoCs.
• 1.6 A first look at connectivity options: board-level buses (I2C, SPI, UART, I3C), differential fieldbuses (CAN FD, RS-485), wireless networks (BLE, Zigbee, Thread, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, Cellular IoT), and application protocols (MQTT vs CoAP).
• 1.7 The lab kit, module roadmap, and Lab 1: EEN1071 learning outcomes, two major assignments, the bench hardware kit, and Lab 1 (headless Raspberry Pi OS setup, sysfs LED control, and Zephyr ESP32 blinky).
• 📝 Knowledge Test: interactive quizzes and concept matching covering all sections of Chapter 1.