Understand how connected products actually work — sensor to cloud — then build one yourself and watch its readings appear in a browser.
Most IoT tutorials hand you a wiring diagram and a code snippet, and you end up with a blinking light and no idea why any of it worked. This course does the opposite. You'll learn the three-tier shape every connected product shares — the device, the gateway that relays it, and the cloud that stores and displays it — and the vocabulary that lets you reason about a product before writing a line of code. Along the way: how to pick the right kind of chip for the job and what you give up with each choice; how sensors turn the physical world into numbers and how actuators turn numbers back into motion; why battery life is a design decision made early or not at all; and how to pick a radio from the confusing pile of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, and cellular. You'll also learn to read a datasheet, which is the skill that separates people who can build from people who can only follow instructions. By the end you'll have wired up an ESP32, pushed its readings to a dashboard, and be able to sketch a whole product on one page and defend every choice on it.
Built by Lakshya Kumar
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I'm learning the fundamentals of IoT — what a microcontroller is and how it differs from a normal computer, how sensors and actuators connect to it, how data moves from a device to the cloud, and how to architect a connected product end-to-end. Help me build the mental model before any code; explain the trade-offs, not just the happy path. I've never built an IoT product before but I can program in [language] and I have access to [hardware, if any].
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When each kind of compute is right — bare-metal MCUs, application-class SoCs, and full Linux SBCs — with the cost, power, and software-effort trade-offs that drive the call.
How a temperature, a tilt, or a beam of light becomes a value your code can read — and how to tell from a datasheet whether it'll be accurate enough.
Motors, servos, relays and solenoids all want more current than your microcontroller can give. Here's how to drive them safely.
Battery life isn't something you optimise at the end — it's decided by choices you make early. Learn which ones, and how to measure the result.
Range, battery drain, cost, and who pays for the network — four trade-offs that decide the answer, and there is no universally right one.
Follow one sensor reading all the way from the pin it appeared on to the chart someone is looking at, and learn every hop in between.
Pull-up resistors, mismatched voltages, and missing capacitors cause most beginner failures. Learn to spot all three before you power up.
A multimeter, a logic analyser, and an oscilloscope each answer a different question. Knowing which to reach for saves hours of guessing.
Wire up an ESP32, publish its readings over MQTT, and watch them land on a live web dashboard — a complete system, built by you.
Complete all modules, then submit the required number of capstone projects. Each must earn a passing rating from an admin reviewer.
Build the canonical first IoT product end-to-end: an ESP32 board reading soil moisture and ambient temperature + humidity, publishing readings to an MQTT broker over Wi-Fi, with a small dashboard that visualises the data and alerts you when the plant gets dry. The point isn't the plant — it's that you've now done device firmware, wireless transport, broker setup, persistence, and a user-facing UI, in one project, end to end.
If you've never touched hardware, this is the right starting point.