Cloud Based Remote Monitoring

AWS IoT Support

The ValuPoint IoT Edge Server or Babel Buster IoT Gateway includes everything necessary to connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT support using MQTT. Once the IoT connection is made, your data can make its way to an AWS database, AWS notification services (e.g. email alerts, text messages), and a variety of analytics tools including QuickSight which makes it quite easy to quickly graph your data. Learn more about AWS IoT here.

The connection between your Modbus or BACnet device is made using templates in the Babel Buster IoT Gateway to tell the gateway what data to send to AWS. Then you log into your AWS account and create a "thing" in your accout which will receive the data. Once the data gets to the AWS database, there are many things you can do with it.

One of the many things you can do with data that has been published to the AWS MQTT broker by the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device is analyze and visualize the data. The screen shot below represents data published by a Control Solutions IoT device.

The AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) can take you down multiple paths which we encourage you to explore through Amazon's online documentation. The simplest and potentially most commonly used form of notification is the text message to your mobile phone.

The notificataion is generated automatically in real time when triggered. A notification based on the above rule would look something like this:

ThingsBoard Support

The ValuPoint IoT Edge Server or Babel Buster IoT Gateway includes support for ThingsBoard's unique MQTT API that allows you to connect your Modbus registers or BACnet objects to dashboard widgets such as gauges, knobs, buttons, and charts. Learn more about ThingsBoard here.

When the dashboard is open for editing, all of the previously placed widgets will have icons in the upper right corner. You can remove a widget by clicking the X. To edit the widget, click the pencil icon.

Whether adding a new widget or editing an existing widget, the templates will look the same for a given widget, but the templates are somewhat different for each widget type.

To configure a gauge to display data from your MQTT device, select data source Entity, select the device name you gave your MQTT device on the Devices page, and then select a data point from tat device. Notice that holding the mouse over the data field area displays a list of all known telemetry points. In this case, we have selected csiSensor2 for display on this gauge.

The MQTT template in the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device is configured to publish data to the gauge upon change or periodically as you desire.

Data points in the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device can be connected to gauges for monitoring, and knobs or switches for control. Data can also simply be charted in ThingsBoard.

 Learn more about the devices

Mosquitto MQTT Support

The ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT MQTT client works well with the widely used open source community supported Mosquitto MQTT broker available at https://mosquitto.org. Simply turn off features unique to ThingsBoard or AWS IoT when using Mosquitto MQTT.

The Mosquitto MQTT broker can be hosted on a local machine or in the cloud. Once MQTT is installed and available, simply provide the host name, port, and client ID. Most likely you will want to enable username/password authentication, so you would also enter those if applicable.

Regardless of where your production server will be located, you can still install a copy of Mosquitto MQTT on a local machine for diagnostics. The following screen shot shows a diagnostic publish to a topic subscribed to by the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device.

You can also use the Mosquitto MQTT diagnostic utilities to monitor whatever is published by the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device. Simply subscribe to the topic that will be published as illustrated below. Each time the ValuPoint or Babel Buster IoT device publishes to that topic, the message will be displayed in the terminal window.