Built around an 8-bit PIC micro-controller, it's a simple platform for building basic wearable electronics, mixing sensors with an LED-matrix display. For the Internet of Things ( IoT ) to reach its full potential , IoT devices need to be effective and affordable , which means minimising the complexities of updating hardware while maximising the life of the hardware and keeping costs low , writes Simon Bisson in an article for ZDNet . While tools like Raspberry Pi and Arduino are popular prototypes for the IoT , they are vastly over - powered for most devices , causing unnecessary complexity and therefore cost . There is also no need for computers to have an embedded operating system on IoT hardware nor do they require a lot of memory . His solution to powering a cheap and flexible IoT is to go back in time to the days of 8-bit computers which consumed very little power and had simple power management schemes and therefore would be low - cost to produce . The only problem , he says , would be finding programmers with the necessary skills which were developed on such old hardware .
For the Internet of Things ( IoT ) to reach its full potential , IoT devices need to be effective and affordable , which means minimising the complexities of updating hardware while maximising the life of the hardware and keeping costs low , writes Simon Bisson in an article for ZDNet . While tools like Raspberry Pi and Arduino are popular prototypes for the IoT , they are vastly over - powered for most devices , causing unnecessary complexity and therefore cost . There is also no need for computers to have an embedded operating system on IoT hardware nor do they require a lot of memory . His solution to powering a cheap and flexible IoT is to go back in time to the days of 8-bit computers which consumed very little power and had simple power management schemes and therefore would be low - cost to produce . The only problem , he says , would be finding programmers with the necessary skills which were developed on such old hardware .