Prototyping bespoke sensor industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) systems for small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

This paper aims to share our experiences gained from working on multiple industrial–academic collaborative projects within the Digital Innovation for Growth (DIfG) regional programme. This initiative provided academic expertise to low-resource SMEs. The projects primarily revolved around measuring various process or structural health variables. The subsequent wireless reporting of these results to an online dashboard and generating alert messages when variables exceeded predefined thresholds were central to our work. Due to the diverse nature of our partners’ requirements, there was no one-size-fits-all solution for the considered use cases. We will delve into our utilization and insights regarding various IoT-related tools and technologies. These include ESP32 WiFi-enabled microcontrollers, WiFi Manager, NTP time service, watchdog timers, Adafruit IO dashboards and the Twilio SMS gateway, as well as LoRa modules and networks such as TNT and Helium. By effectively combining these tools and technologies, we successfully completed prototypes that enabled testing of the devices on-site.