“This IoT Pizza Finder is a class assignment for the CNM IoT workforce development course to teach to integrate the web into IoT devices.
Central New Mexico Community College’s IoT Bootcamp is focused on providing non-traditional workforce development training to individuals looking to get into a technology career.
As part of our learning, we explore various ways to connect IoT devices to the Cloud both to send and receive data. The below project is inspired by a Pizza Compass project that Joe Grand did for Hackaday back in 2021. Joe does an amazing (and entertaining job) of walking through the functional and hardware design. In the class, we create our own twist on Joe’s work by having our microcontroller query a Node-Red flow that then queries TomTom*** to retrieve coordinate.
NOTE: many APIs are now requiring a credit card, even to utilize their free services. This, for obvious reasons, does not work in a class environment. TomTom was selected as they allow basic queries without the need of providing a credit card. Thank you TomTom from students and educators everywhere.
The project reuses a PCB created for another class project that teaches GPS and LoRa communication.
The LoRa module is not needed for the Pizza Finder, so a button was placed into those PCB locations. And, the solar power connection is not used. Otherwise, it takes advantage of integrated GPS module and I2C interface for a small OLED display.
The Pizza Finder is outfitted with a Particle Boron microcontroller to enable cellular connectivity and thus mobility. The device sends a query to a Node-Red server (hosted on DigitalOcean) via MQTT. The Node-Red flow, in turn, queries the TomTom API to return the coordinates of the closest Pizza parlor.”