NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE IN HARDCOVER

Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things

100 Ways You Can Make the World a Better Place

You don’t have to be a techie. That was the rule I wrote this book under. Inside are 100 field-ready recipes for use cases covering things like rural flood warning, wildfire detection, crop irrigation, water quality, and energy waste to name a few. Each one is broken down into what to buy, how to build it, and what it will tell you. Everything runs on inexpensive sensors you can order today. If you’re an NGO working in the field, a sustainability leader at a company, a teacher looking for a classroom project, or someone passionate about sustainability and wants to help, this book was written for you.

What This Book Actually Gives You

The Internet of Things has spent two decades being pitched as a future. This book treats it as available inventory.

Every recipe follows the same structure: the problem stated in plain terms, the parts you need, where to put them, how to wire them up, and what the readings will tell you. No vendor lock-in, no hand-waving, no assumption that you have an engineering team standing by.

• A shopping list for every recipe. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf sensors and devices you can order today.
• Step-by-step instructions written for non-techies. If you can follow a recipe in a cookbook, you can follow these.
• Simple analytics over exotic models. Most environmental wins come from thresholds, trends, and timely alerts — not from a research lab.
• Questions at the end of every chapter. Written so the book works as a classroom text, not just a reference.

The Goals this Book Covers

Eleven of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals, each with its own chapter:

“The Sustainable Development Goals are one of humanity’s clearest shared frameworks for addressing
hunger, health, water, energy, climate, and protecting life on Earth. Rob Tiffany takes a refreshingly
pragmatic approach, showing how commodity IoT technology can be applied immediately, today, to give
communities the evidence they need to spot problems sooner and act faster. Global impact begins locally.”

RAY OZZIE · Founder & Executive Chairman, Blues Inc.

Who This Book is For

• NGOs and field organizations. You already know the problem better than anyone. This is the parts list.
• Corporate Sustainability, ESG, and EHS leaders. Stop estimating and start measuring, at a hardware cost that doesn’t need board approval.
• High school teachers. Every recipe is a classroom project with a real-world outcome.
• College students. Capstone projects that solve something instead of simulating something.
• University professors. A full curriculum structured around the UN goals, with questions built into every chapter.
• Anyone who wants to help. You didn’t know where to start. Now you do.

For Teachers and Professors

I wrote this so it would work in a classroom, and I’d rather it end up there than anywhere else.

High school: every recipe is a self-contained project with a parts list. Most cost less than a graphing calculator, and students end up holding something that measures the actual world.

University: eleven UN goals, one per chapter, with end-of-chapter questions. It maps onto a semester without modification. Syllabus mapping, slides, and instructor review copies are available.

Submit the following form and I’ll get back to you shortly:

Bulk and Organizational Orders

Equipping a team, a cohort, or a conference audience? Bulk pricing is available for orders of 10 or more, with signed copies for larger runs.

Submit the following form and I’ll get back to you shortly:

About Rob Tiffany

As one of the pioneers of IoT, Rob Tiffany has spent three decades building the Internet of Things, starting with connected vending machines in 1994, five years before anyone called it the Internet of Things. He went on to co-design Azure IoT at Microsoft, Lumada IIoT at Hitachi, the Thunderstruck IoT platform for agriculture at Ericsson, and is a U.S. Navy veteran who served aboard Trident submarines and SEAL team delivery vehicles. He’s taken his IoT “know-how” and wrote the definitive book for pointing that technology at our planet’s hardest problems: 100 buildable recipes spanning 11 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, each with an affordable shopping list, and written so that you don’t have to be an engineer to use them. He is the author of nine books and hosts the IoT Coffee Talk podcast.

Press & Media Inquiries

Book details