Bidirectional communication sometimes it’s relevant on the Internet of Things field. In some LPWAN protocols it’s complex to have bidirectional communication. With Sigfox and thethings.iO it’s really easy to set up bidirectional communication, that is called downlink.

Sigfox downlink with thethings.iO

What is Sigfox uplink and downlink?

The uplink process is the usual way of data coming from the devices to the Sigfox backend, that can be redirected to thethings.iO with a callback. Find here how to connect Sigfox with thethings.iO.

The downlink process is the process that enables a device to get data coming from a cloud, a mobile application or another device.

This downlink process is only available when the uplink process includes an ACK flag corresponding to a downlink request. At that point thethings.iO will be available to transfer the downlink message to the device through the Sigfox backend.

Find here a diagram by disk91 where you can understand better the downlink workflow interaction.

Let’s build the downlink

Make sure you already have:

• A Sigfox device sending data. If you need to activate your sigfox device, navigate to http://backend.sigfox.com/activate.
• Access to the Sigfox backend of the previous device.
• A thethings.iO account. If you still don’t have an account, please register at thethings.iO IoT platform.

Let’s start!

thethings.iO IoT Platform

Once you have an account, if you don’t have a Sigfox product to use, follow this steps:

1. Enter to your account and click on Things.
2. Press on Create new IoT product.
3. Select Sigfox as Serialisation format.
4. Give a name and choose Akeru/Smart Everything for the board.
5. Click on the previously created product and copy the subscription URL.

Registering the Callback at the Sigfox backend

Once you have copied the previous url, navigate to the Sigfox backend.

1. Click on your device.
2. Navigate to callbacks.
3. Create a new Callback: Make sure you select DATA and BIDIR as the type and POST as the HTTP Method.
4. Given the previous url, add /downlink at the end of the url. The url should look similar to: https://subscription.thethings.io/sgfx/1234/abcdefghijklmn/downlink?id={device}&data={data}Also, if you want any other Sigfox variables, feel free to add: &radius={radius}&seqNumber={seqNumber}&snr={snr}&time={time}&station={station}&rssi={rssi}&ack={ack}

The Sigfox downlink parser at thethings.iO

Following the registration of the callback at the sigfox backend, we should proceed to create and fill the sigfox_downlink_parser associated to your product:

1. Navigate to Cloud Code
2. Move to Functions and create a new function called sigfox_downlink_parser. Make sure to introduce the previous name correctly.
3. Fill the sigfox_downlink_parser:
   • In order to prepare the data to be returned to the device, follow the next structure:
     • The result variable should be an object: With the device id as the key and with a new variable (limit size of 8 bytes) as the value:
       var result = {“sigfoxDeviceId”: { “downlinkData”: “variable or message to send”}}
4. Following the previous requirement, a simple parser should look like this:
   function main(params, callback) {
var result = {};

var variable = "sigfoxDw";
result[params.deviceId] = { downlinkData: variable };
callback(null, result);
}

Device downlink management

Each sigfox device library should provide the necessary function in order to extract the acknowledged data from thethings.iO.

Focusing on the Smart Everything, there’s an example on github showing the handling of the downlink data.

Feel free to create an account at thethings.iO and start connecting things to the Internet with the most simple enterprise IoT platform.

Geolocate a device is very powerful in some use cases. Understand where is an asset, my car or my dog is priceless in specific moments where there is money or life in risk. All of this depends on having GPS availability on the hardware, usually a GPS chip introduced on the shield with an antenna. With the GPRS and 3G, etc the antenna’s triangulation enabled IoT devices (and mobile handsets) to become geolocalized with some errors but without GPS chip. Now Sigfox is releasing a similar feature, Sigfox antennas triangulation enable geolocation with no GPS chip, that makes your hardware cheaper than expected.

Today we are going to connect a Sigfox device with the Spot’it service. Spot’it is the newest location manager of Sigfox. Now with thethings.iO and Sigfox Spot’it you can track all your Sigfox devices in a very simple way. thethings.iO is the most simple Sigfox IoT platform.

Make sure you already have:

• A Sigfox device sending data. If you need to activate your Sigfox device, navigate to http://backend.sigfox.com/activate.
• Access to the Sigfox backend of the previous device.
• A thethings.iO account. If you still don’t have an account, please register at thethings.iO IoT platform.

Let’s start!

thethings.iO IoT Platform

Once you have an account, if you don’t have a Sigfox product to use, follow this steps:

1. Enter to your account and click on Things.
2. Press on Create new IoT product.
3. Select Sigfox as Serialisation format.
4. Give a name and choose Akeru for the board.
5. Click on the previously created product and copy the subscription URL.

Registering the Callback at the Sigfox backend

Once you have copied the previous url, navigate to the Sigfox backend.

1. Click on your device.
2. Navigate to callbacks.
3. Create a new callback. Make sure you choose Service as the type of callback and GEOLOC as the type of service.
4. Beginning with the previous URL, make sure to erase the data={data} and include lat and lng to the previous url.

The url should look like this: https://subscription.thethings.io/sgfx/geo/1234/abcdefghijklmn?id={device}&lat={lat}&lng={lng}

Also, if you want any other Sigfox variables, feel free to add: &radius={radius}&seqNumber={seqNumber}&snr={snr}&time={time}&station={station}&rssi={rssi}

All the Sigfox variables that you specify will be automatically parsed into resources in your thethings.iO thing.

Showing device location as a path at thethings.iO is simple

First of all go to create a thethings.iO dashboard.

To create a dashboard in your thethings.iO account to show the device location in a map. The location should be presented as a path of different points in a map.

1. Click on the Add Widget blue button.
2. Give a name to the Widget.
3. Select Thing Resource inside Data Source.
4. Select thing you just created before.
5. Select ‘Spotit’ as the name of the resource that contains the location.
6. Check Historical and press the Routes box.
7. Click on Costumize it and select the number values you want to show. Also select “Activate markers to show each point and Activate path”.
8. Accept and Save!

Easy right? Now you can geolocate any Sigfox device and see the routes and more information at thethings.iO in just 5 minutes. Try it yourself!

At thethings.io we use Cassandra as our master time series database. Some weeks ago we needed to upgrade our Cassandra version to a major release version in order to improve the QoS of our architecture.

This post aims to group all steps that we use for upgrade our Cassandra cluster to a newer version. There are a lot of documentation and sometimes it is a little bit annoying to look at different pages. In case that you use Cassandra for Internet of Things (or any other use case) we hope that this post will be useful.

This section describes how to upgrade Apache Cassandra with zero downtime if your cluster has a replication factor of at least 3.

Note:

• Be careful when you run these steps on production environments.
• For command simplicity I don’t include the user and password. Ex: nodetool drain -u username -pw password

Prerequisites

• Make sure you have an up-to-date daily backup. We use nodetool snapshot tool for that but there are other options as well like OpsCenter.
• Familiarize yourself with the changes and features in this new release.
• Remove all dead nodes.
• Do not run nodetool repair or other tasks.

Please check this link for more information.

Steps for upgrade cassandra version

1. Run nodetool drain before shutting down the existing Cassandra service. This flushes all memtables from the node to SSTables on disk. Cassandra stops listening for connections from the client and other nodes. Also prevents overcounts of counter data, and speeds up restart post-upgrade.

nodetool drain -h hostname

2. Stop cassandra services.

service cassandra stop
service datastax-agent stop

3. Back up your cassandra configuration files from the old installation to safe place.

4. Update java version.

apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default
java -version

5. Install the new version of Apache Cassandra.

apt-get update
apt-get install cassandra=3.0.9

If you are running Cassandra from a source you should download the latest tar.gz instead of using the package manager.

6. Configure the new product. Review, compare, merge and/or update any modifications you have previously made into the new configuration files for the new version (cassandra.yml, cassandra-env.sh, etc.). Take care with the configuration options and check version restrictions.

7. Start the cassandra services.

service cassandra start
service datastax-agent start

Check the logs for warnings, errors, and exceptions.

tail -f /ttio/var/logs/cassandra/system.log # or path where you set your logs.

8. Run nodetool upgradesstables

nodetool upgradesstables

9. Check the logs for warnings, errors, and exceptions.

tail -f /ttio/var/logs/cassandra/system.log # or path where you set your logs.

10. Check the status of the cluster

nodetool -h hostname status

11. Repeat theses upgrade steps on each node in the cluster.

References

• Upgrading Apache Cassandra
• Cassandra High Performance Cookbook
• Cassandra The Definitive Guide
• Mastering Apache Cassandra

[Note: this article was first published on Adria Galin’s blog]

Industry is getting into the Internet of Things, some call it Industry 4.0 some other use other names. The hard thing of the industry is that sometimes the companies still use old protocols, legacy machines and systems. The protocol OPC UA (Unified Architecture) is one of the most extended IoT industrial standard for automation. At thethings.iO we want to lead industrial companies to get into the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. This is the reason why we are enabling our industrial customers with IoT gateways and compatibility with existing industrial products such as KEPServerEX, to seamlessly stream real-time industrial data to thethings.iO and apply all the operational tools and Big Data with cloud code and build dashboards and apps for final customers, among other features.

Step 1: Install KEPServerEX

First, during the installation of KEPServerEx, we choose the IoT Gateway under Plug-Ins to be installed as well. We select ‘Entire feature will be installed on local hard drive’.

Step 2: Add an agent with REST client

After the installation is finished, we open KEPServerEX and then right-click on ‘IoT Gateway’ and select ‘New Agent’.

Then we choose a name for your agent and as type “REST Client”. Click ‘Next’.

Now, at the endpoint configuration, at the URL field we insert http://api.devices.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN where THING_TOKEN is the token of the thing you want to send the data to. As method, we choose POST, put the publish rate to 1000 and select ‘Wide Format’.

After that, we  leave the header configuration empty and click ‘Finish’.

Step 3: Add IoT Items

The next step is to add an IoT Item to send data from. In order to do that, we click on our freshly created Agent and then on ‘Add IoT items…’.

For this tutorial we will use a simulator which generates random numbers and send them to thethings.iO

In the Tag Browser, we click on Simulation Examples, then on ‘Functions’ and choose Random4. Then we click ‘Apply’.

At the window for the item configuration that opens next, in the publish field we select ‘Every Scan’, leave everything else as it is and click ’OK’.

Step 4: Configure the agent

The last step is to do some final configuration on the agent we created before. For that, we right click on the agent  and choose ‘Properties’.

Then, in the body tab, we choose ‘Advanced Template’ and put the following:

{
    “values”:[
    |#each VALUES|
        {“key”: “test”, “value”: “|VALUE|”}#unless @last|,|/unless|
    |/each|
    ]
}

After that,  we click on ‘OK’. If everything went well you will see the following message:

We can now go to our panel at thethings.iO and see how the random numbers are arriving!

thethings.iO is the most simple enterprise IoT platform. Do not hesitate to sign up and test it with your KEPServerEX with OPC UA. We are the IoT platform that you are looking for.