C O U R S E D E S C R I P T I O N S

For more details and enrollment information for next classes, see www.microfacturingusa.org

FOUNDATIONS OF IOT

IoT fundamentally involves sensing, analysis, and taking actions. Real IoT services often involves large numbers and types of sensors. This course explains how all of this works.

The strength of this course is that it provides a tour of the entire IoT ecosystem—starting from hardware elements, progressing through software and networking and finally making everything work through cloud service providers, such as Google, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services.

No technical background is assumed. This course is designed for non-technical people to rapidly understand industry jargon, building blocks of any IoT system and engage with an experienced instructor.

About This Course

The rapid growth of smart devices such as smart homes, driverless cars, drones, wearable technology, and smart cities has rapidly created many high-paying job opportunities that are available to those that have the skills.

This course has been designed by professionals working in the field who understand the skills required to get started and provide immediate value for potential employers. The goal of this course is to provide guidance to our students so that they may gain employment in high-paying jobs.

• What is IoT? What does it mean for me?

• The hardware: SoCs, sensors and actuators

• The software: Introduction to Python—relax, you won’t be programming much in this course!

• The network: wireless networks, mesh networks and connecting to the internet

• Cloud Services: how to connect to AWS, Azure, Google, or other major services

What Will I Learn?

Learners in this course implement a

real-world global IoT system that works.

All IoT begins with nature—the sensing

hardware figures out what is going on around it. This

information is then processed, passed along to a network,

processed some more, and some action is taken. In this

course, we use a part of nature that we all know well,

which is light.

Light is not only fundamental to most things that we do,

but electrical lighting consumes about twenty percent

of the world’s electrical energy! If you want to make a

difference with climate change, this course will teach

some highly relevant way to do that too.

About This Course

You’ll learn some interesting things about the properties of light and how to use it across many applications. Using inexpensive off the shelf hardware, you’ll build a smart package tracker IoT system that can be put into any shipped package and detect if the contents have been exposed to excessive heat, humidity, temperature, or other factors. If it has, then a message will be sent across the internet to the customer, who will know to inspect or reject that package.

No technical background is required. You’ll need basic math, some interest in science, and the desire to build a real IoT system. Anyone who works hard will succeed in this course, but this is intermediate level and will require three to four-hours of solid work per week for most people.

• Review of how an IoT system works

• The basics of light and color

• LED components and luminaires

• Cloud connected intelligent lighting systems

• Hands-on practical building of an LED breadboard

• Lab work to connect and control a light through the cloud

• Wireless networks and how to use them

• Antennae and RF propagation —how to get more range than Bluetooth or WIFI

IOT FOR WORK, L IFE AND PL AY

What Will I Learn?

This course shifts from designing and building IoT gadgets to learning how to use the data coming from hundreds of millions of IoT or other smart machines. You’ll learn

the language of data scientists, some common tools of people that use lots of data and gain some hands-on experience in how to create value for yourself or your business—by the smart application of data!

About This Course

The exploding demand for data science professionals is well documented, with average salaries above six figures and LinkedIn reporting a shortage of over 150,000 people with data science skills. This course is not only for students looking to explore jobs in data science, but also to explore the power of statistical thinking in less conventional areas of their lives and careers. A data science background can make a more powerful investor or elevate your side hustle!

This course covers the fundamentals of making money with data. Students will be exposed to data science concepts like cleaning, organizing and visualizing data. Each module also includes lessons on how to apply a data driven mentality to real world situations.

The Making Money with Data course can be taken entirely at your own pace. It combines short, video-based lessons and exercises with powerful case-based homework assignments. All lessons and exercises are performed in Jupyter Notebook.

• How to use data to understand a situation and tell a story, random variables, mean, variance, covariance, correlation, distributions, confidence intervals and statistical significance.

• Python for data analysis

• NumPy and Pandas basics

• Data frames

• Variable types, data aggregation

• Merging data sets

• Data visualization

• Predicting what will happen in the future

What Will I Learn?

MAKING MONEY WITH DATA

We’ve grown up with wireless technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth. While these are great technologies, the effective range is only about ten meters. With IoT devices

to be installed in many locations that require a much longer wireless transmission range, what can be used? Cell phone technology can be used, but it typically involves higher cost and reduced battery life. This course will teach you about the differences in wireless networks and which ones are best for different situations.

About This Course

Wireless communication is a critical part of our daily lives and also a key element of most IoT systems. However, many people don’t understand how wireless systems work, what the system options are, and how to make the best choices for your system.

This is a six-week mini-course that can be conducted largely at your own pace. You’ll learn how wireless works in general, what are some of the best technologies to apply to longer range wireless transmission, and how to build IoT devices that get better range and simply work better.

Even more interesting, you’ll learn cutting edge techniques of how to create large networks of smart IoT devices using new types of wireless networks, such as mesh networks. These approaches are very powerful since they can add or delete IoT devices dynamically.

• Basics of wireless communication

• What is a radio wave and how does it propagate?

• The language of Wireless: RF spectrum allocations, signal coexistence, decibels, and modulation

• A look at radio signals

• Review of radio standards that can be used for IoT

• Mesh networks

• Antenna patterns, gain, and types of antennae

• Radio signal propagation and link budgets

• Radio power and impact on battery life

What Will I Learn?

WIRELESS FOR THE IOT ERA

IoT Creator is a unique feature of the IoT JobJump program available through the www.microfacturingusa.org

website. Through this powerful set of tools, a user can rapidly create virtual IoT prototypes.

Users will be able to use opensource software, existing IoT hardware, and combine these with their own inventions to rapidly create virtual IoT products or services. For instance, adding an Alexa voice interface to a product takes only a few keystrokes.

About This Course

Creators will experiment with a variety of approaches to build a virtual product and test it online. For those that want to go further and create a physical prototype, the IoT Creator framework will provide useful links and tools that will enable users to pursue prototypes at their own cost.

• How to use popular OpenSource repositories such as GitHub and others

• What engineering and user forums are—and how to leverage them

• How to rapidly create virtual prototypes

• Using a virtual prototype to test the market response to your ideas

• How to include your innovative projects in IoT Creator as part of our career credentials

What Will I Learn?

IOT CREATOR