The master’s thesis deal with design and realization of measuring station, which process data from environmental sensors in IoT environment. Thesis includes research of sensors, cloud services for IoT, microcontrollers and environmental data available online. Thesis contains detailed procedure for realization of designed system, including code description for microcontrollers STM32W55 and STM32 B-L475E-IOT01A2 Discovery kit, configuration of IBM Watson IoT Platform cloud service and procedure for correct programming of Node-RED application responsible for logic of whole system. Source code, which might be used for simple implementation of designed system, is attached to the master’s thesis.

This research project is part of the Internet of Things and People (IoTaP) project at Malmo ̈ University. The project focuses on the aspects of human-computer interaction in a visual programming environment. Visual programming is becoming increasingly popular in different sector of the IT world. Visual programming allows for novices or non-professional programmers to create systems without any or extensive scripting/coding skills. The research presented in this thesis is on a visual rapid prototyping environment that is founded on an existing smart home platform, and allows for designers and developer to prototype smart home concepts using smart devices. The research methodologies used involve Design Science methods infused with User-Centered Design principles and methods (Participatory Design). The research process involves a series of workshops performed with some of the IoTaP smart home re- searcher. The research process also involves qualitative investigation of existing visual prototyping tools and techniques.A prototype of a visual rapid prototyping environment was used to evaluate the research findings. The evaluation process focused on defining the benefits of a visual rapid prototyping environment and how it can help improve the design and testing process of smart home devices.

The oil and gas industry faces a lack of compact drilling devices capable of performing horizontal drilling maneuvers in depleted or abandoned wells in order to enhance oil recovery. The purpose of this project was to design and develop a smart sensing system that can be later implemented in compact drilling devices used to perform horizontal drilling to enhance oil recovery in wells. A smart sensor is the combination of a sensing element (sensor) and a microprocessor. Hence, a smart sensing system is an arrangement that consists of different sensors, where one or more have smart capabilities. The sensing system was built and tested in a laboratory setting. For this, a test bench was used as a case study to simulate the operation from a micro-drilling device. The smart sensing system integrated the sensors essential for the direct operational measurements required for the robot. The focus was on selecting reliable and sturdy components that can handle the operation Down the Hole (DTH) on the final lateral micro-drilling robot. The sensing system's recorded data was sent to a microcontroller, where it was processed and then presented visually to the operator through a User Interface (UI) developed in a cloud-based framework. The information was filtered, processed, and sent to a controller that executed commands and sent signals to the test bench’s actuators. The smart sensing system included novel modules and sensors suitable for the operation in a harsh environment such as the one faced in the drilling process. Furthermore, it was designed as an independent, flexible module that can be implemented in test benches with different settings and early robotic prototypes. The outcome of this project was a sensing system able to provide robotic drilling devices with flexibility while providing accurate and reliable measurements during their operation.

Recent advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) are placing its own vision, as a platform of interconnected services and devices, at the heart of the smart home concept. This consolidation promises a new wave of innovative products designed in the open, and in which the user takes center stage starting from the very first steps. Therefore, researchers as well as product designers in these increasingly related fields are now tasked with a more complex mission when investigating user behavior. In this thesis we consider rapid prototyping as the upcoming standard process for investigating user interactions in the future smart home. Although past research contributed with several self-contained solutions (built from scratch) to allow such investigations, no accounts were found tackling the problem from our perspective, in which the focus is on how to enable rapid prototyping in an existing proprietary smart home platform by using open standards, software and hardware. To answer this question, we conducted our research with participation of academic researchers and professional designers in the context of an academic and industrial partnership, in an ongoing smart home research project. We used an approach based on the design science research process in combination with the user centered design (UCD) and agile software development methodologies. During this thesis we performed an end to end design process starting from ideation to implementation and evaluation; an architectural blueprint was proposed and a working prototype of our visual smart home rapid prototyping environment (SHRPE) was implemented and tested. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of enabling visual rapid prototyping capabilities in an existing smart home platform, by using the system integration process to introduce available open standards, software and hardware tools into the platform. In addition, evaluation results of user testing confirmed that using UCD to iteratively capture user needs in such complex context is a solid approach.