Device Onboarding

IoTConnect

Device Onboarding

IoTConnect is a robust IoT platform that allows you to quickly and efficiently create an IoT application for your company, customers or end-users. This article will explain the basic requirements and provide steps to quickly get started with the platform. After going through this post, you can:

  • Register your company
  • Create a template
  • Create a device
  • Send data to IoTConnect and check device / sensor output using a simulator or actual device
  • View real-time telemetry data

Steps to quickly get started

1. Platform setup and company registration

Sign in into the IoTConnect environment to access its features and modules. Your selected IoTConnect environment will have a company profile with a unique CPID.

2. Create a template

Templates consist of unique identifiers and allow you to allocate attributes, properties and commands associated with the devices you want to connect. To get started quickly you can create a standard template using JSON format.

Learn more about templates in IoTConnect here.

3. Create a device

You need to provide a unique ID which helps to identify the device along with a display name. Select the template which you have defined in the earlier step to proceed with device creation. You can also leave notes or describe the device that you are adding. The device will be added in active state and displayed on the devices screen.

Learn more about parent devices and tags here.

Clicking on the unique ID or the edit button on this screen will display a new screen with numerous other parameters.

Notes
Note: To add or create a device you will need to create an entity. To learn about entity creation in IoTConnect, visit our user guide.

4. Send data to IoTConnect and check sensor output

There are two ways that you can send data to IoTConnect:

A. Device simulation
IoTConnect provides a simulator to check the flow of data. The data simulation is operational for a defined interval and duration. To check the connectivity and data flow, you can simulate a device from device properties that can be found in the Device module.

You can input the values accordingly:

  • Interval – It is a time interval in seconds for which your device will send data.
  • Duration – Time duration in minutes till which the data will be sent from the device at the set interval.
  • Min – Minimum value of an attribute.
  • Max – Maximum value of an attribute.
  • Precision – It allows you to set the granularity of the data sent by the sensor.

Note: You will see simulator radio button only when your device is registered with the platform and attributes are defined for the device.

B. SDK integration for actual devices

  1. For successful device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device communication, IoTConnect provides SDKs for various programming languages. SDK integration consists of;
    • Initialize / Create IoTConnectSDK object
    • Send data
  2. Receive data / Callback function
    For more information on SDK integration, click here.
    For SDK code samples, click here.

5. View real-time data – telemetry / graph / tabular

Once you have achieved connectivity, you can view real-time data of the added device by clicking on the device’s unique ID from the list of devices. Navigate to the Live Data tab which gives you telemetry, graph and tabular options. Clicking on each will show you the data received as per the intervals and durations you defined in the earlier steps.

For more information on viewing live data, click here.