Difference between revisions of "Datonis Resources"

Latest revision as of 07:18, 20 July 2017

Signing up and creating your account

Before you begin with Datonis, you will need to Sign UP and create your account. After you sign up, the UI will take you through a tour of important sections for managing your account.

Since it is an evaluation version, it will allow you to connect 5 Things (or assets) by default. For upgrading your account, please reach out to sales@altizon.com.

Connectivity

Broadly, there are 2 kinds of assets that you typically connect to the Datonis IOT platform

• Machines or Equipment within a specific area like a factory
• Assets that are deployed remotely within a geography (example: oil wells or wind turbines etc.)

We recommend a few best practices while connecting assets in these two scenarios

Connecting machines or equipment within a factory

In this scenario, machines are equipment usually have data collected via PLCs like Siemens, Rockwell, Allen Bradley and data made available over a Local Area Network (Ethernet) via:

• OPC server (UA/DA)
• Modbus
• MTConnect

We recommend using the Datonis Edge Gateway that can:

• Collect data using downstream protocols like OPC UA/DA, Modbus etc. for several machines
• Buffer, aggregate, process and push it to Datonis using either HTTP(s) or MQTT(s) using secure mechanisms

You can find all information related to downloading builds, installing and configuring the Edge gateway over here.

Connecting remote assets

Following are a few examples of monitoring remote assets:

• Energy meters deployed across households in remote locations
• Oil wells equipped with devices for measuring yield and movement
• Wind turbines equipped with devices for monitoring battery status, blade movement, wind velocity etc.

These are usually lone assets that have some sort of a hardware controller (e.g. STM32 (ARM), PIC32 (Atmel), Arduino (Atmel), Marvel (ARM), Galilieo (i386), Raspberry PI (ARM)). Signals for measuring sensor outputs are connected at digital general purpose IO pins on these boards.

Depending on the computing power of the board, you have following options:

Board with very limited memory and computing power (RAM in KBs) without a formal Operating System

These boards may or may not come with a Real Time Operating System (RTOS). In this scenario, we recommend using our C SDK and customizing it and cross compiling it to your needs.

Resources:

• Github location for the C SDK
• Trying the C SDK on a Linux computer

Customization work includes following activities:

• Tweaking data types based on compiler requirements for your board
• Replacing the Linux based TCP/IP API with TCP/IP API for your board (read, write etc.)
• Making provision for generating an epoch timestamp on the board (using ticks etc.)
• In case your board has a modem attached, configuring http calls via AT commands
• Writing buffering and re-transmission logic to handle internet outages
• Reading and converting input signals over IO pins and converting into numeric values

Board with a formal operating system like Linux/Windows

Examples of such boards include Raspberry PI that can run Raspibian. You may want to use one of the following ways to connect to Datonis:

• Write a custom adapter/plugin within the Datonis Edge Gateway
• Use the Datonis JAVA SDK (Github location for the JAVA SDK)
• Use the Datonis Python SDK (Github location for the Python SDK)

Some customization work is still required when you use the JAVA or Python SDKs:

• Writing buffering and re-transmission logic to handle internet outages
• Reading and converting input signals over IO pins and converting into numeric values

Managing your Datonis Cloud Account (Datonis IOT Platform documentation)

For performing management activities (like defining Thing templates, creating things, setting up rules and notifications, setting up access control etc.) on the Datonis Platform, you can refer the Datonis Platform Documentation. This section has step by step instructions on how to use various features on the platform.

Help and Support

In case you need help or have questions regarding the platform, you can sign up and raise a request at our Support Portal

Developing applications/solutions using Datonis as an IOT Platform

Datonis API

Datonis provides REST API for integrating 3rd Party systems (e.g. SAP) or developing applications (e.g. Machine health application) for end users. Please refer Datonis API documentation for more details and examples.

You can use these API for programmatically performing all activities that can be done otherwise from the Datonis Platform UI:

• Managing thing templates
• Managing things
• Creating rules and notifications
• Managing instructions (for performing control actions on your assets in the field)
• Querying data for your connected things
• Managing access control (Roles, Users and Key Pairs)

Application Development framework

Datonis also has a ready to use Web application development framework that you can use to build applications specific to your requirements, without you needing to start from scratch. For more details on developer requirements please refer this link.

OEM Features

Child Accounts

If you are an Altizon Partner, you can have multiple separate child accounts created for each of your customers. These child accounts can then be linked to your Partner (parent) account. You can then manage all your customer accounts from your central parent account. This allows you to segregate data and configuration for each of your customers and have different kinds of resources reservations depending on the assets connected for each customer. For upgrading your account to an OEM Partner account, please reach out to sales@altizon.com

Alias Keys for Things

If you are a hardware partner and pre-fabricate devices with your own unique keys or identifiers, you can associate or link this alias key with a Thing on the Datonis Platform. Such an arrangement lets you:

• Pre-fabricate devices with your own unique keys without needing to create a thing on the Datonis Platform
• Replace a faulty device fabricated with a new unique key to an existing Thing on the platform without needing to re-create the Thing again
• Re-purpose devices and attach to different assets (this needs you to move the alias key linking on the Datonis Platform)