🦑 IoT Backends
Thingsboard

ThingsBoard Setup

  1. Setup ThingsBoard, according to the ThingsBoard documentation: https://thingsboard.io/docs/ (opens in a new tab)
  2. In the Thingsboard dashboard, create a new "device" (under "entities")
  3. Use the "device id" generated by Thingsboard in the fields general.system_identifier:
  1. Set up the MQTT credentials. Username and password can be as you like, the MQTT Client ID has to be the same as the Thingsboard client ID.

  1. Use the config.default.json file to create a config.json file on your sensor node. Set general.config_revision to -1 and general.system_identifier to the system identifier you received from Thingsboard.

    {
  "general": {
     "config_revision": -1,
     "software_version": "1.1.0",
     "system_identifier": "ab12cd..."
  },
  "backend": {
    "provider": "tenta",
    "mqtt_connection": ...
  },
}

  2. You can publish new configurations with Thingsboard using "shared attributes" using the attribute name "configuration". Here, you have to keep track of the revision number yourself – as opposed to Tenta. Whenever you update the configuration here, the respective client will receive it. It will only update to configurations with a higher revision number.

  1. The data of the sensor node will be published to the topic v1/devices/me/telemetry in the JSON format:
{ "ts": 1451649600512, "values": { "key1": "value1", "key2": "value2" } }

  1. The logs will also be published as telemetry data to the topic v1/devices/me/telemetry in the JSON format:

    {
  "ts": 1451649600512,
  "values": {
    "logging": {
      "level": "...",
      "subject": "...",
      "body": "..."
    }
  }
}

  2. The sensor node will send status updates on configuration updates to the topic v1/devices/me/telemetry in the JSON format:

    {
  "ts": 1451649600512,
  "values": {
    "configuration": {
      "status": "...",
      "config": "..."
    }
  }
}

  3. The data can be visualized using any chart. The logs and config status updates, can be read using the Thingsboard API or visualized using a text table widget: https://thingsboard.io/docs/iot-gateway/guides/how-to-enable-remote-logging/ (opens in a new tab).

💡

In Hermes (opens in a new tab), we solved these initial steps with setup script for each Raspberry Pi that put an initial config with a sensor identifier on the device and published this initial config to Tenta.

TentaOther