Building your way to a serverless powered IOT Buzzwire game

What happens when your IoT device can't connect to the cloud days before a conference? See the serverless workaround that saved this project from a last-minute hardware failure.

#1about 3 minutes

Personal IoT projects and agritech examples

The speaker shares personal IoT projects like an interactive wedding cake and a solar-powered hydroponics system to illustrate real-world applications.

#2about 5 minutes

Introducing the serverless IoT buzzwire game

A buzzwire game was developed for an AWS re:Invent booth to create an interactive experience demonstrating distributed tracing with a live leaderboard.

#3about 3 minutes

Designing and 3D printing the game hardware

The physical game was prototyped using Tinkercad and printed on a dual-head 3D printer with OctoPi, using repurposed TV coax cables for the wire.

#4about 8 minutes

Choosing the ESP32 and designing the AWS architecture

The project uses an ESP32 microcontroller with an initial cloud architecture plan involving AWS IoT, SQS, Lambda for processing, and DynamoDB for storage.

#5about 5 minutes

Debugging SSL handshake failures with an older ESP32 board

The older ESP32 board failed to connect to AWS IoT due to an outdated SSL certificate, a problem that produced no clear error messages.

#6about 4 minutes

Implementing a workaround using a direct Lambda endpoint

To bypass the SSL issue, the architecture was changed to have the device send data directly to a public AWS Lambda endpoint via an HTTP GET request.

#7about 11 minutes

Live demo and tracing errors to DynamoDB

A live demo shows how distributed tracing can identify that a data type mismatch error originates from DynamoDB, not the Lambda function processing the request.

#8about 3 minutes

Key takeaways for building and debugging IoT projects

Key lessons from the project include the importance of planning for extra time, monitoring everything, and the unexpected usefulness of keeping old cables.

#9about 25 minutes

Audience Q&A on serverless IoT development

The speaker answers audience questions about AWS certifications, recommended languages, databases, security considerations, and future trends in serverless IoT.