Architecture
Hardware
We have tried many many sensors and gateways.
We have also tried many radio's including ZigBee, ZWave, LORA, BLE, WiFi and for Cellular, LTE and a few that we have probably forgotten.
- Our favorite sensors use BLE and NFC for Accelerometer, Temperature, Humidity, Barometric presure
- Our favorite gateway is a Raspberry PI 4, because of it's Size, Cost and the vast array of contributors to stackoverflow.com. We use WiFi, Ethernet and Cellular to connect to the cloud
We have worked with Texas Instruments, Broadcomm and Marvel writing software for their embedded systems. And lastly we use the awesome Node-RED to build complete systems with JavaScript, HTML, CSS and many Javascript libraries.
Software.
For an editor - we use Atom
Having worked for IBM, our favorite integration engine was IBM's Message Broker - now part of a Cloud Pak. Today however all of our projects are developed with Node-RED and we are looking forward to upcoming offerings from FlowForge.
- For an operating system we use "Buster" Buster is based on the latest version of Debian Linux 10, with Linux kernel version 4.19, and 8.3 GCC compiler. .
- For ESP32 and ESP8266 we use the Arduino IDE to publish and subscribe with artifacts written in C++.
- For Raspberry Pi projects, we use Node-RED with function nodes written in JavaScript with an occasional call out to a few lines of Python.
- For web pages, we embed Nginx into our Raspberry Pi's which is more performant than Apache. Then we use WebSockets to communicate with node-RED via MQTT all running on the same Raspberry Pi.
We work with both wired (Modbus, Serial, GPIO, I2C) and wireless (BLE, WiFi, Lora) sensors that can connect to a Raspberry Pi using nodes and flows that you can get from Node-RED
Services
Check our Services
Hardware Selection
While we love our Raspberry Pi's, we also work with ESP8266 and ESP32 processors.
Software Tools
We have used many many tools to build IoT Solutions - we can advise on tool selection.
Systems Integration
We have been doing Connectivity and Systems Integration for many years at IBM. Databases, PLC's, Packaged Software - if it has API's it's easy, if it does not, we are not above screen scraping.
Getting Started.
working as an observer for Global Alumni's Professional Education "Beyond IOT" we wanted to show students how to start an IoT project, we realized that most people who start on IoT don't have any Sensors or Gateways. We provided links to sources - such as https://www.adafruit.com but to get started with IoT we built a small demo that allows you to take a photograph from a file and run it through a Facial Recognition Engine - all done on an existing Mac, Windows, Linux or Raspberry Pi machine.
Click the Word image to download just the installation guide. Click the Dropbox image to download the complete package - which includes the installation guide.