IoTConnect

Device onboarding

With this guide, you’ll be able to understand in brief the process of onboarding your device with IoTConnect.

There are five key steps for device onboarding. The last step is optional.

Let’s dive into the steps in details:

Select the type of device

There are four types of devices that you can create a template for:

  • Smart devices
  • Gateway devices
  • Edge devices
  • Edge gateway devices

With smart devices you can directly connect with IoTConnect and perform analytics in the cloud. When devices do not have the capability to connect to an IoT platform on their own, IoT gateways help them to intersect or connect with the network, cloud or data center. These gateways can either be dedicated hardware or software programs. For edge devices, you can connect your devices and perform analytics closer to your application and data sources. And with edge gateway devices, you can perform analytics on the gateway devices instead of cloud.

You can select the type of device from the Devices tab.

(Screen: Devices)

(Screen: Devices Type)

To simplify device onboarding, let’s take an example of smart device.

The next step is to create template for the device.

Template management

IoTConnect’s template management feature allows you to add and manage devices, define associated data captured by the device in the form of attributes and set commands to allocate actions you want your devices to perform.

You can access template from devices tab. This is an important and first step to add attributes of your devices and select the cloud to device and device to cloud communication methods.

(Screen: Add Template)

(Screen: Devices_Templates)

Let’s take an example of temperature and humidity template.

Click on Create Template.

(Screen: Create Template)

Add all the information about the template:

(Screen: Template Details)

For authentication, we have the following types for securing your device: Key, Self-signed, CA-signed and TPM.

  • Key-based device authentication is one of the simple ways to authenticate any IoT device with SAS token.
  • A CA certificate is a digital certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA). You can upload a CA certificate from Certificate module in Devices segment.
  • Self-signed certificate on the other hand is created by users themselves.
  • Trusted Platform Module is a hardware security module that stores cryptographic keys for authentication purpose.

Note:

For Self-signed and CA-signed certificate – you need to upload a certificate from the certificate module. We recommended to use CA signed during production environment and for development environment,you can use self-signed.

For our example, we have used Key certificate.

To know more about certification, you can read our article on device authentication.

We will add attributes of our device from the Template segment.

Attributes allow you to enter details about the data that will be captured by the assigned device in the form of name, data type and unit. Continuing the previous example, we’ll mention the name here as temperature and another one as humidity, data will be captured in numeric format so the data type will be number

We will add details about temperature and humidity, as per our example:

(Screen: Attributes_Temperature)

Description, data validation and unit are non-mandatory fields. With the description tab, you can add details about the attribute. Data validation can be used when you want to specify the range or set of data that you want to capture like 1,2,3 or red, green, blue, – separated by a comma or giving a range as 10 to 20. As for unit, considering our example, we can mention Fahrenheit to measure temperature.

(Screen: Attributes_Humidity)

You will see that Temperature attribute is added in the list and we are adding humidity template too.

Twin Property allows you to set your device to its default settings.

(Screen: Twin Property))

For our example, we have set the default value for our smart device to 50.

The property name is used for reference purpose. Key is associated with the device that we want to set the twin property for. Data type can either be string or number. We then have to set a default value that we want our device to receive and load whenever twin property is triggered.

Command name is for your reference. Command can be a string or number or a combination of both that indicates what you are expecting the device to do when the command is fired. If the command requires certain parameters, then you need to turn on the key. Similarly, if you require a receipt or notification when the command is fired, you need to turn on that key too. Also, if the command is fired over the air, you need to turn on the last key mentioned here.

(Screen: Commands)

The next step after creating template is to add devices.

Device management

IoTConnect’s deivce management feature allows you to add, whitelist and manage devices. You can simulate data for the devices to test the dataflow. Moreover, you can also run commands and get visualization of the data received.

Once the template has been created, we will now create a device on IoTConnect. From the left side menu, under Device, go to Devices. Click Create Device.

(Screen: Add Device)

(Screen: Device Details)

Add details about your device like the unique ID associated with it, template that you created for the device and entity.

Entity can be the name of your organization or department. You can find more details about this in our entity management article.

To get your device connect with the cloud, you need to acquire your device.

(Screen: Device Acquire)

(Screen: Device Acquire_Confirmation)

This allows you to whitelist your device so that data can be sent to IoTConnect.

You can view device details from the Device List page. You will see prefilled information of the selected device in view mode on this page.

(Screen: Device List))

The red line that you see on the left side turns green for a particular device when the device is connected with IoTConnect and data exchange is initiated.

The next and crucial step after adding device details is to configure SDKs.

SDK integration

To integrate SDK with your device, you need to download our SDK file.

(Screen: Resources)

Select the language that you want for your SDK

(Screen: SDK details)

Code Sample: You can download code samples of the language of your choice.

Public Methods: You can get the list of public methods to execute SDKs from this segment.

View Details: You can get details about the selected SDK where you can also download sample code to embed with your solution

Download SDK

(Screen: Download SDK)

Download sample file from Sample Code

(Screen: Download Sample Code)

For our example, we have chosen Python language and downloaded symmetric key sample v2.2.0.

You can read the steps to run the Python code here.

Replace CPID and environment details in the code. You can get these details from Key Vault in Settings segment

(Screen: Key Vault)

Run your SDK

Once the SDK is run successfully, you can run your code for IoTConnect to start receiving data from the device. Your device icon will turn green:

(Screen: Device_Active)

After the successful configuration of SDK, it’s time to see the data in action with visualization.

Visualization

Go to the device details segment of your device as shown below:

(Screen: Device Visualization)

You can see live, telemetry and historic data in these tabs:

Live Data:

(Screen: Telemetry Data)

(Screen: Live Data_Graph)

(Screen: Live Data_Tabular)

Historic Data:

(Screen: Historic Data)

The next step is to execute command. This is an optional step.

Execute Commands

You can run commands from the Device Details tab as shown in the screen below:

(Screen: Execute Command)

The details of the commands executed will be displayed in the list.

Once you have onboarded your device with IoTConnect and the communication is established, you can add multiple devices, build your solution and offer to your customers.

To get in-depth understanding about the modules of IoTConnect, you can refer to our user guides.

Help and Support

Browse Help and Support categories to get assistance on everything concerning your account. You can resolve your queries by using any of the following methods.

(Screen: Help and support)

Conclusion

The Partner Program quickstart guide can assist you in learning how quickly you can develop and deploy your solutions or products using our IoT Partner Program. This guide reduces your time and efforts with just a few steps, so you can start using the Partner Program quickly.