Selecting your IoT devices for AWS IoT

We already know that there are a lot of IoT devices on the market. To work with AWS IoT, Amazon provides guidelines about a list of IoT devices with supported AWS IoT. You can read it at https://aws.amazon.com/iot-platform/getting-started/#kits. Otherwise, you can use own IoT devices and ensure that they are compatible with AWS IoT SDK by referring to https://aws.amazon.com/iot-platform/sdk/.

From this, you can make a self-assessment when you select an IoT device for the AWS IoT platform. You can verify your selection with the following questions:

• Does the IoT device have a network capability? A network capability probably can identity network features such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and LoRa.
• Does the IoT device network module give support for the AWS IoT protocol? Make sure your IoT device can communicate with external devices through HTTP, MQTT, or MQTT over Websocket.

If your IoT device does not fit these criteria, your IoT device can connect to AWS IoT using a third approach—attaching your IoT device to a network device, for instance, a computer, and then connecting from a program inside the computer to AWS IoT.

We will explore and review some IoT devices to connect AWS IoT in the next section. The following are the three IoT devices that we will review in this chapter:

• Raspberry Pi 3
• Arduino Yún
• ESP32 board