About the Author

Zhang Hongyuan

Architect & IoT Specialist

Since 2016 he has designed and maintained the open-source industrial IoT platform IoT DC3, starting from device protocol parsing and gradually building a complete system covering multi-protocol access, data collection, permission isolation, and platform management. Every extension of the platform's capabilities came from needs discovered layer by layer in real projects — not piling on features, but solving each layer's problems properly.

Since 2024 he has been integrating large language models into the platform, exploring the capabilities and boundaries of AI agents in industrial IoT scenarios: understanding intent, analyzing anomalies, and calling tools within authorized boundaries. The deeper he goes, the clearer it becomes: intelligence only means something when it rests on reliable data and governed capabilities.

This book grows out of these two consecutive phases of hands-on work, and records the fundamentals and boundaries that were confirmed again and again along the way.

The Author's Daily Life

If you turned a normal day into four panels, it would look something like this: build a ladder, climb over an actual wall, surf the web for references, then settle in to learn. The "wall" here is a literal one — climbing it means finding a route for protocols, not slipping away to slack off; "surfing" means looking up references; the only things that reliably get out of hand are browser tabs and coffee consumption.

Build a ladder: Raise the engineering problem a little so it is easier to see which layer is complaining.

Climb the wall: A literal wall — not to slip away and slack off, but to find a route that lets the protocol through.

Surf: The browser tabs multiply while documentation, ideas, and coffee join the network.

Keep learning: Architecture by day, comments by night, null-pointer debugging in dreams.