BonsaiFog is an IoT app which can be used to run an active learning lab to introduce Fog computing to CS students. It is described in

Antonio Brogi, Stefano Forti, Ahmad Ibrahim, Luca Rinaldi
Bonsai in the Fog: an Active Learning Lab with Fog Computing
in Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC 2018),
Barcelona, Spain, 2018.

If you wish to reuse this code for other research, please cite the above mentioned article.

To design the activity, we took inspiration from the following use case:

A bonsai greenhouse company planning to adopt a software solution to monitor and visualise soil moisture of their cultivation.

The activity is a two-hours hands-on session designed to

• constitute a first hands-on programming lab on Fog computing, practically showing the difference between IoT+Edge, IoT+Cloud and Fog deployment models, by exploiting active learning methodologies
• have a quick learning curve, only requiring students familiarity with high-level programming languages (so that the activity could fit in a two-hours session),
• have limited cost (i.e., hundreds of euro3) with respect to enterprise solutions (i.e., thousands of euro), possibly being cross-platform with respect to different (students’ laptops) operating systems.

To achieve these goals, we created a lifelike scenario that can be incremented step-by-step to show all different deployment models (viz., IoT+Edge, IoT+Cloud and Fog).

To set up the experimental IoT testbed capable of monitoring moisture of the plants growing in the greenhouse, we employed micro:bits, cheap and easy-to-use embedded systems that can be programmed in JavaScript. JavaScript has also been used for implementing a gateway module.

Below we show the testbed we implemented for the purposes of the active learning practical.