Mesh networks are playing an important part in the Internet of Things thanks to solutions such as Riots. What is Riots? Riots is an easy and cost effective plug and play Arduino compatible solution for cloud-based sensing and remote control. Riots includes a dynamic cloud interface from which you are able to sense conditions beyond the physical boundaries and remotely react to them.

Riots contains a mama, babies, a capacitive touch button, a DC control (power in/power out connector), and a USB-UART gateway (for local programming and debugging) . The Riots mama allows internet access for the Riots network; while the Riots babies are the sensors which include a sensor light, sensor air, sensor gyro. The light sensor senses the color, intensity and blink count of the light. The air sensor senses the temperature, humidity and pressure; while the gyro sensor is a gyroscope sensor as well as an accelerometer sensor which senses movement.

The brains of the Riots components is an Atmel 8-bit microcontroller with a 32 kB on-chip flash programming memory. The Riots breakout board where you plug in your sensors comes with an inter-integrated circuit (I2C), universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART), serial peripheral interface (SPI), pulse width modulation (PWM) and general-purpose input/output (GPIO).

The entire Riots network works by using the mesh networking principles of connecting various members (nodes) of a network together to relay data for the network. One single mama can manage hundreds of uniquely tasked babies. Babies are also capable of communicating directly with other babies without external control.

You can use Riots to monitor and control things like the humidity levels in a room. You simply attach a baby in the room and another baby in the ventilation room and then connect the mama to the internet and add Riots family to your Riots cloud account. You will now be able to monitor and control the babies from the Riots cloud.

All individual Riots can be wirelessly reprogrammed from the internet, and the Riots network is easily extendable and updateable. How you use and utilize Riots to suit your needs is completely up to your imagination as there are thousands of ways you can exploit Riots to your benefit. A few other features that make Riots such a great solution is that it's open source, it doesn't require soldering or wiring, it's Arduino compatible, it's remotely programmable, it's affordable and minimalistic.

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