ELECFREAKS Smart IoT Platforms

Established in the year 2011 and located in Shenzhen, China, ELECFREAKS is a company focusing on the micro:bit developed kits and accessories with full services of researching, manufacturing, and selling. Now, ELECFREAKS focuses on the development and sales of micro:bit related accessories. At present, tens of thousands of schools and educational institutions in more than 100 countries and regions worldwide use ELECFREAKS products, courses, and services.

With the development of the micro:bit hardware, we realize that a platform to collect the possible data in our daily life could play an important role in helping learners to understand better on how the micro:bit hardware sensors could be implemented in real experiences.

Before introducing our IoT platforms, you may want to know what IoT platform is? The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of physical objects, or "things," that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. Essentially, it's about connecting everyday objects to the internet and each other, enabling them to collect and share data, and perform various tasks autonomously. 

So, what is ELECFREAKS Smart IoT platforms and how could it be operated?

SmartIoT is an IoT platform focused on STEAM education. It enables students to collect and analyze sensor data during the learning process, provides teachers with functions such as class management and student account management, and supports the addition of custom data charts and buttons to meet diverse teaching control needs, effectively improving the teaching quality and learning outcomes of STEAM education.

ELECFREAKS Smart IoT is a simple platform to make it possible for getting connections in 3 minutes, and it abandons the complicated data analysis to make the data easy to identify and collect. In details, you may find a brief introduction below:

You can get access to it with the portal: https://www.smartiot.space/. 

There are multiple languages could be selected by clicking the “Language”, by clicking login to get into the platform or you will need to register if you haven’t done this before.

After getting into the platform, we are able to see clear table of contents of the Devices, MQTT, Dashboards, Class management and Triggers.

Devices are the topics we assign on “My Device” field, we are able to create at most 10 devices for an account.

In each device, we are able to see more details by selecting to see “View Detail” , for example:

We can see that the number of different data is listed in the first part, with numbers, concrete uploaded time and the field; and following with the Line Chart to help to analyze the data more straightforward. 

For controlling and uploading the device data, we can use the MakeCode platform: https://makecode.microbit.org/#, and we will just use the “Connect smart IoT with User Token and Topic” to activate the device, and we drag the blocks of the hardware sensors in the programming page to complete the code part on this platform. Afterwards you will see a series of data are uploaded in the smart IoT platform. 

For more operating details such as the programming, you may refer to our WIKI page. 

Regarding the second MQTT, this is a well-known access which means the a lightweight, publish-subscribe messaging protocol designed for constrained devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency, or unreliable networks. It's commonly used in the Internet of Things (IoT) for communication between devices and the cloud, and we expect to complete this part in July/August in the year 2025.

Following is the most prominent feature for ELECFREAKS Smart IoT platform, the class management settings.

The teacher management system is designed to simplify the teaching management process and improve the efficiency of teaching preparation. Through the simple operation interface, teachers can:

Quickly create classes to meet the needs of class division in different teaching scenarios;

Batch import student information to reduce the workload of manual entry;

Automatically generate a unique account and password for each student, lowering the operating threshold for students to use the platform, allowing students to quickly engage in learning.

At the same time, it is able to monitor the data for multiple students.

Also, it supports the chart sharing by doing public sharing and the specified person sharing:

Public sharing: After the link is generated, any user with the link can access and view it, which is suitable for the public sharing of course resources;

Specified person sharing: supports precise designation of sharing objects, and can select specific accounts or class members to ensure the security and pertinence of data sharing.

And it support the devices sharing as well, the accuracy of device configuration has a significant impact on classroom teaching efficiency.

The platform supports fast export/import of device configuration. Teachers can preset standard device configuration templates in advance and import them with one click when using them in class, effectively avoiding teaching interruptions caused by incorrect device configuration.

While displaying the data, there are also a series displaying formats you can select:

Line chart: suitable for displaying data change trends;

Pie chart: convenient for displaying data proportion relationships;

Dashboard: intuitively display key indicators;

Data display: accurately present specific data values;

LED trigger light: realize data visualization warning.

Triggers:

The idea is to use to send feedback of triggering by email/SMS and other information channels.

AI summary function: AI outputs data analysis and summary based on device data information

Third-party account login: You can use Google/GitHub and other platform accounts to log in

Platform novice guide: Add a novice guide to the platform in the future to get started quickly

We are still in the process to develop the Triggers function and hope it could be implemented soon.

By far, we’ve done a general introduction to our new Smart IoT platforms, hope it could help users to gain a better experience in exploring the world with these data analysis tools, if you have any questions or ideas, please may just feel free to reach out to services@elecfreaks.com.