Rapid prototyping of IoT solutions: a developer's perspective

Many new Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and solutions appear in the market every day. Although commercial IoT products are the majority, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solutions implemented by independent developers still represent a significant driving force. In this scenario, the availability of development tools for both less experienced developers and professionals to reduce the time to create prototypes is crucial. In this paper, we first review the tools available to implement all the components of a typical IoT architecture in different programming languages, then, we analyze how Python can be used to implement all the components of a typical IoT architecture. As a practical example, we illustrate the implementation of a smart home system built exploiting low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and programmed only through Python.