I am working on edge computing for IoT applications and expected to create a system that acts as a near edge computer with the use of a raspberry pi hooked up to a dht11 sensor. How do I send this data over to a computer that is at the edge? Ideally I want to use my PC as this device but I have no clue how to send this data over in real time.
So far I have created the circuit and can view the temperature and humidity readings on the raspberry pi in python. Unsure of what the next steps are - I don't want to send this data over to the cloud just yet.
Side note: I believe i may be missing knowledge regarding this but is the raspberry pi an edge device because it is hooked up to the sensor directly?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
You need to think this through a bit more. What will you do with the temperature and humidity data that you receive?
For example, if you're just experimenting and want to just see the readings in a console on your PC, you can use netcat to send the console output of your Python program from the RPi to PC. No SW development needed, they just have to be in the same network. Not particularly useful for anything else, either.
Otherwise you need to set up some client-server solution between the RPi and your PC. There's a ton of possible solutions, all depending on what you plan to do with the data. You can use MQTT, HTTP, a straight database connection (MySQL, PostgreSQL), etc. You have to supply both sides of the connection. The Python code on client side which connects and sends data; and the server side thing that accepts the samples and stores them somewhere. Plus all the networking, authentication etc.
Or you can just download the Python client libraries for your favourite cloud solution and set that up according to a tutorial. TBH, this sounds a lot less work to me.
Related
I'm researching and trying to building a RC car that can be controlled by the internet. I've started looking into how communication over the web works, but I seem to be going nowhere. My goal for the project is straight forward:
The RC car has an on-board camera and 4g wifi router that enables communication (driving commands, video streaming) over the internet. A Raspberry Pi will serve as the on-board computer.
I will be able to control the car with my PC even across the globe, as long as I'm connected.
I want to preferably do as much by myself as possible without relying too much on other people's code.
So here are my questions:
How does an application communicate over the internet? What is the interface between the application's logic (e.g pressing "w" to go forward), and transmitting/receiving that command over the internet?
How is video data stream handled?
I've looked into WebRTC and WebSockets for communication, but they are aimed at providing real time communication to web browsers and mobile, not something like a raspberry pi, and I'm still in the blind as for exactly what technology should I use, and in general the overview and architecture of real time communication.
All I've achieved so far was an app that sends text messages between devices through a server on my network, with very primitive reading/writing using java Socket.
In short, what does messenger/skype/zoom do in the background when you send a message or video call?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
First things first. You cannot do real-time control over Internet, period. There is absolutely no way to guarantee the delivery latency. Your control commands can arrive with a delay from milliseconds to seconds, or never. No way around it.
Now, you can still do a number of reasonable steps to absorb that unpredictable latency as much as possible and safe-guard your remote robot from the consequences of the unreliable communication.
For example, instead of sending the drive commands directly - as in, acceleration, deceleration, turn angle, etc., you can send a projected trajectory that is calculated from your drive commands locally on a model. Your RC car must be sufficiently smart to do some form of localisation - at the very least, wheel odometry, and with a good enough time sync between the sender and the RC car you'll be able to control the behaviour remotely without nasty consequences of drive commands executed at an unpredictable delay.
You can add a heart-beat to your protocol, to monitor the quality of the communication line, and if hear-beat is delayed or missing, initiate emergency stop.
Also, don't bother with TCP, use UDP only and maintain your own sequence counter to monitor missing packets. Same applies to the telemetry stream, not just command channel.
I am a web developer and I am starting to learn about the world of IoT.
Because of the vaccines arrival to my country (Argentina) I got asked to build 80 temperature sensors to monitor them and I have some questions about it.
What would be the best way to connect all of them to the cloud?
If I use for example aws iot platform, do you know how much it would cost monthly for just sending
and storing temperature logs for each sensor (remember, there are 80 of them)?
Is there any language/environment/protocol that works better for IoT? Because it's a constant flow
of lightweight data...
Is there a better way to connect them to the internet besides using esp32 modules for
each?(I saw a tutorial that said it's possible to connect some more to a single esp32 module)
If you have any advice I'd love to hear it. I know how to code but when it comes to backend and specially server stuff I have a lot to learn.
Costs are directly related to the amount of data you send, process and store. You'd have to check the price lists for each cloud service you plan to use. If we assume that you'll be sending 1 temperature reading (with associated data such as timestamp, device id, ...) every 10 minutes using reasonable protocols (MQTT, JSON) then the total costs for all 80 devices would be perhaps a few dollars per month. The total database storage will accumulate over time and you'll be charged more, but honestly the amount of data under these conditions is ridiculously low.
An ESP32 is cheap, has WiFi and enough performance to send data to cloud. You can connect this micro to AWS IoT or Google Cloud IoT using the relevant libraries from either: AWS library or Google IoT library. These libraries decide the questions of language and protocol on the microcontroller side - it's C and MQTT/HTTPS (but avoid the HTTPS, MQTT is much more practial). You can use JSON for the actual temperature data message. The microcontroller development takes place with either ESP IDF (a bit lower-level C environment) or Arduino (a bit higher-level C/C++ environment). Those use FreeRTOS as the OS on micro (note that the IoT libraries work on almost anything).
A practical alternative to ESP IDF and Arduino (especially for a web dev) is Mongoose OS where you can do much of the development work in JavaScript (not all, though). It has high-level libraries for both AWS and Google IoT (which still use the same underlying MQTT/HTTPS client, I assume).
By far the easiest way to connect the ESP32 modules to Internet is to have each connect to a WiFi AP. If the single WiFi AP doesn't cover all devices, add more until they do. ESP32 does have a mesh networking library, but I would hesitate to recommend it to newbies.
I am trying to establish communication between laptop and RPI. So far, I have used python and socket programming to do that. Now, instead of using actual sensors, I want to simulate sensor behavior by which sensor data can be sent from laptop to RPI.
So far I came across some options to do it:
Using IMB Bluemix IoT simulator or
Using simple python scripts to create sensor data or
Using simulink sensor models
Can anyone give me a better idea or any comment about these options please?
This semester I have a project where I need to send data from my microcontroller to my PC and read/interpret its data. We are doing this using an ftdi cable and using matlab to read the data.
I would like to know if there is a way that I can see if my matlab code works that doesn't involve me going to the lab to test it. That is, if there is a way to simulate receiving data in a USB port of my computer so that I can test if my code is working.
Thanks in advance
i've been struggling lately with integrating Rasperry Pi and IBM Presence Insight
for wifi proximity detection
the official documentation describes raspberry pi as possible Wifi Proximity sensor, but there is no available documentation
someone tried it before ?
In order to use Raspberry Pi as a proximity sensor, you will need to:
Build a raspberry pi device with two different wifi adapters
Configure one wifi adapter to be an publicly visible endpoint
Write code to capture every time a mobile device tries to connect to the endpoint
Report that information back to Presence Insights.
Unfortunately, the chunk of code you need to write has not been open sourced, so you will need to do this on your own.
You could probably hack together a solution. It looks like there are a lot of resources out there online about "seeing who connects to my network [1], [2]" You could probably use one of these solutions and just feed the data into Presence Insights in the correct format (see the documentation about "proximity connectors.")
[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/204057/how-to-see-who%E2%80%99s-connected-to-your-wi-fi-network/
[2] https://github.com/tlhunter/node-wireless