Mohamed zied Chaari (Qatar University & Qatar, Qatar); Gilroy Philbert Pereira (Thakaa Technologies & Qatar Scientific Club, Qatar)
With the age of the Internet of Things approaching, students and developers the world over want to start their experiments and design unique products. However, with so many options present in both the hardware and IoT platform space, it can often confuse beginners about which options are easy to work with and light on one's wallet. Our objective is to highlight two free IoT platform options, by implementing a simple LED blinking system using the popular microcontroller ESP32. We use the ESP32 microcontroller due to its wonderful developer community, free Software Development Kit, and Arduino support, and compare the mature Blynk IoT platform to ESP32's native ESP Rainmaker. Both platforms are free for developers and come with their mobile applications and ESP32 code. Interestingly, it was observed that the Blynk IoT application was faster in communicating with the ESP32 by seconds. Blynk IoT's no-code approach makes for a greatly customizable dashboard. On the other hand, The ESP Rainmaker application was easier to set up as the dashboard is set up by the ESP32 firmware and it is easier to switch between WiFi networks. Choosing between the two depends on one's own goals and capabilities.