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Ben Christel edited this page Jun 17, 2022 · 1 revision

A device is a piece of computing hardware. It may translate physical or analog inputs into digital outputs, or vice versa.

A set of devices can interact, forming a SoftwareSystem.

Examples:

  • Laptops
  • Phones
  • Keyboards
  • Mice
  • Speakers
  • Printers
  • Cameras

One device or many?

Is a typical smartphone one device or several? After all, it has a camera, microphone, speaker, display, USB port, SSD, and probably other parts that talk to the CPU.

How you choose to model the phone depends on the needs of your System model. If you're designing the high-level architecture of a web application where the phone is a client, you probably don't need to model all its peripheral devices—you can just consider the phone as a unit. However, if you are designing the in-process architecture of a phone app, you probably want to consider the core logic of your app as a separate Component from the display, camera, persistent storage, etc.

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