A lot of IoT lives in the software world; dashboards, data lakes, machine learning insights, visualization tools, business intelligence strategies, KPIs and metrics. That’s fine, but the cold, hard, truth is: If your hardware isn’t right, your work is kaput! Software teams, no matter how brilliant, often underestimate how physical reality shapes outcomes. Watch a room full of programmers blinking on when the internet stops.
This morning our technical lead spoke about a client requirement for outdoor electrical connectivity. Based on that requirement, the projected result is product death by lightning strike at some future point, as yet unknown. The client has a wish list. Unfortunately mother nature does not bargain.
Form follows function, but function follows matter. In a saltwater environment your enclosure corrodes, it’s worthless. An entire array of juice sucking monsters is the midnight manager’s maintenance nightmare. IoT engineers know that sometimes you have to fight to keep function from being sacrificed in the name of “form.”
Engineers who have done this before know that certain connectors degrade, that certain adhesives fail under temperature swings and that vibration destroys solder joints. They carry an innate tactile knowledge of materials and construction that software teams cannot download. Software developers think about exceptions in terms of error handling. Hardware teams think about exceptions in terms of devices catching fire or failing when a trucker drops it off a loading dock..
Manufacturing is not a deployment script. Software is copied at scale; hardware is built at scale. Component shortages, supply chain bottlenecks and minor spec changes can derail entire projects if not accounted for from the start. And you can’t account for everything at the start. Project management is focused on cost, scope, quality and documentation, but maybe that elephant in the room is reality.
You can dream up the perfect IoT device in seconds, but real-world physics, supply chains, materials, and manufacturability slaps back. Even in the best cases concept has to be translated into reality’s terms. That translation process, from pure abstraction to functionality, is where the good stuff happens.
