Tech Diary

In my previous blog post, I have written about the integration of Google Cloud IoTCore using UDOO and how the temperature information is sent up to Pub/Sub. In the post, I will describe the integration of Raspberry PI to Google Cloud IoTCore. The primary communication protocol between the sensors and the IoTHub is mosquitto MQTT. For this setup, I have a temperature sensor using ESP8266 flashed with ESP Easy firmware. The ESP and sensor are battery power which set to wake up every 60 minutes to take the measurement and transfer this to Raspberry Pi. The IOT bridge is written in Python which bridges the internal MQTT messages and Google Cloud IoTCore. The sensor is battery power using a 3rd party Nokia BL-5C (1020 mah) rechargeable battery. This can be cheaply purchased from many battery shops or online. I have used 2 versions of the Wemos Mini charging shield version (1.1and 1.2). The details on how to modify the version 1.1 to be able to read the voltage level of the ba...

UDOO Quad is a maker SBC board from UDOO . It has a built-in Arduino microcontroller and can run Linux on the SBC. On the web, most of the Google IoT Core samples have been focused using Mongoose OS and I have written a post on " Journey into Google Cloud IoT Core with ESP8266 and Mongoose OS ". Recently, Google releases code samples which make the initial handshaking with Cloud IoTCore simpler.  For UDOO, the tedious part is to get all supporting tools to work with a particular version of Linux Distribution. UDOO supports a few Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian and others). I have installed Ubuntu and the current version supported by UDOO is 14.04 LTS. For this demo, I wanted to work on Python 3.5 and I have compiled the Python from source. This is step may not be necessary if you use the version that is installed (Python 3.4). The idea for this project is to read the temperature and humidity reading from UDOO Arduino side, transfer the data to Linux side and forward t...

Google recently take the IoT Core to Public Beta. IoT Core is one of the product lines of Google entry to the IoT arena. It is a device registry for controlling and tracking the IoT devices. On top of this, it provides connectivity to the rest of the Google services. Below is the standard diagram provided by Google for the IoT Core. As we can see, there are 10 big parts in this entire chain (including the edge devices). Some parts are more complicated than the others. For this article, I will start the journey by exploring the following path. I will be using an ESP8266 running on the Mongoose OS because Mongoose OS has native support for Cloud IoT Core. This will reduce the work required to perform the authentication between the device and the IoT Core. ESP 8266 & Mongoose IoT Core setup Mongoose OS website has a set of setup instructions  on configuring the devices to connect to IoTCore. The Mongoose OS example stopped at when the message is successfully del...