Assessing Hardware during IoT Application Development

[Alicia_Black]

@Aidan_Zebertavage

When first beginning an IoT project, many enterprises pursue pilot studies to understand the feasibility and long-term scalability of their application design. An early and very important step in IoT application development is to align on hardware requirements for your project - and ensure that the capability to collect and ultimately send data to the cloud is feasible.

For the August edition of Losant Discussions, we are diving into hardware and the processes that our community of developers uses to establish requirements, assess, and select hardware components for their IoT applications.

This is an open conversation around hardware assessment, and we are most interested in our developer’s perspectives - What is challenging? What is essential?

The below prompts are to get you thinking about hardware and the issues you may or may not face in your day-to-day development work.

• Knowing that its very use-case specific, when developing projects for your enterprise, what is commonly used at the prototype level for hardware?
• How often as IoT developers can you influence this decision?
• What hardware characteristics are essential to understand early on in enterprise pilot-scale development for your application? What key factors are missing from the below criteria:
  • Data acquisition and control
  • Data processing and storage
  • Connectivity
  • Power Management
  • Footprint / Size
• How do you balance cost vs. functionality?
• When you move on from pilot studies, how often are you reassessing your hardware needs?
• When developing for a pilot scale, factors like flexibility, affordability, and modularity may have larger importance, than during production, when hardware needs to be reliable, manufacturable, and be easily integrated - how do you manage the transition at the hardware level?
• Developer/maker boards (Raspberry Pi, Particle, Espressif, etc.) are commonly used for independent projects - How often are these same boards used at scale for production enterprise applications?
  • How do you choose between microcontrollers and single-board computers?
• Are there use cases or applications you were unable to pursue due to lack of adequate hardware?

I’ll be here throughout the afternoon and beyond to moderate, assist and act as your connection to Losant experts - and I’ll be chiming in with my own perspective here and there.

From my experience, pilot projects live or die by how early hardware decisions are aligned with long-term goals. Too many teams pick hardware for “proof of concept” that later can’t scale or be certified for production.

At the prototype level, I usually lean toward ESP32 or Raspberry Pi depending on the processing and connectivity needs. ESP32 is great when you want tight control, low power, and built-in Wi-Fi. Raspberry Pi works well when the project involves heavier local computation or camera-based input.

As developers, we rarely get full control over hardware choices in enterprise settings, but influencing requirements is key. That means documenting trade-offs early: how connectivity, security, and power constraints shape what hardware actually makes sense.

When moving from pilot to production, I treat the pilot hardware as a concept validator, not the final product. The real work starts in picking production-grade modules, ensuring consistent supply, and simplifying firmware updates.

Balancing cost and functionality comes down to lifecycle perspective. A board that costs $5 more but saves weeks in firmware optimization or debugging usually wins in the long run.