Now that we have a better understanding of wireless communications, let's take a look at how we would incorporate Wi-Fi into our edge analytics applications. In the following diagram, we will design a smart heating system for an ice rink:
For a country of 37 million people, Canada boasts over 3,000 indoor skating rinks. You will easily find a rink in almost every small town and neighborhood. A common complaint among patrons of ice rinks is how cold it is in the stands. Many rinks have heaters above the seats; however, knowing when to turn on the heat or keep it shut off to save on energy bills is a decision that needs to be constantly made.
Our preceding smart heater edge analytics application promises to fix this. Using a temperature sensor and a camera for image recognition, our application checks the temperature and scans for people in the seats. It can turn on the heaters when the vision recognition software determines that there are a certain number of people in the seats. It can then turn on the heater and maintain a certain temperature using the temperature sensor. The operation of the application is done through our edge device, in this case, a Raspberry Pi computer. A cloud-based dashboard is updated through the internet.
We can see that our edge device is connected using Wi-Fi to the internet router. Wi-Fi is the best option for communicating to the router, and in turn, the internet, as rinks tend to have Wi-Fi access throughout. We would use 5 GHz Wi-Fi instead of 2.4 GHz, as ice rinks tend to have open designs due to the size of the ice. There are only a few objects to interrupt our Wi-Fi signal.
Let's now take a look at Bluetooth, a technology designed for short-distance communications, and see how we may incorporate this concept into our edge analytics applications.