I’ve been playing a ton with the IoT space over the past 4-6 months. It’s been a ton of fun from a number of directions.
- I love to play with devices. I’ve got Arduinos, Raspberry PIs, Minnow Boards, Galileos and more. But my latest is the Tessel.
- I love playing with large scale cloud infrastructures as well.
- I love learning new technologies.
This last bit has pushed me in all three of those areas. I’ve been working with Tim Park on an IoT framework called Nitrogen which is built in node.js and runs in Azure. Working on Nitrogen has really pushed my node.js knowledge and I had never done anything with Ember prior to this. And then pile on top of that the vast number of devices out there and there’s something new for me to learn every day. 🙂
Yesterday I started playing with my Tessel and seeing if I could connect it up to Nitrogen’s MQTT gateway. Ivan Judson was kind enough to stand one up for me that I can start playing with. It was ridiculously easy to get going from there.
I started with the Climate Logging over MQTT project found on the Tessel site and modified it for Nitrogen.
The big change with Nitrogen is the format of the topic for subscriptions. Rather than being a simple string is a JSON object. For example, rather than just being “temperature” or something like that, is a subscription to messages routed to this particular device.
var subscription = ‘{“to”: \”‘+deviceId+‘\” }’;
Check out all the code on Github at https://github.com/joshholmes/tessel2nitrogen.
https://github.com/joshholmes/tessel2nitrogen