Raspberry Pi IoT project using Artik IoT platform

Want to build a Raspberry Pi IoT project using Artik cloud. Learn how to connect sensors to Raspberry Pi and send data to Samsung Artik

In this Raspberry Pi  IoT project, we connect Samsung Artik cloud to Raspberry Pi. This guide describes step by step how to build your first Raspberry Pi project using Artik cloud platform.

Artik IoT platform is an end-to-end IoT platform that helps us to build awesome Raspberry Pi IoT projects. It is an open platform that enables different devices to connect to the cloud. Through Artik platform, connected devices and sensors send information to the cloud. Later, application, services or other connected devices use this information according to their business requirements. As you may already know, Internet of things is the next technological revolution that will have a huge impact on our lives, so it is important to know how to design and build an IoT project based on Raspberry Pi. Before reading this tutorial, it is important you have a complete overview of what is Internet of things and how it will impact our future.

As said before, this tutorial wants to provide a step by step description about how to implement a Raspberry Pi IoT project using Samsung Artik IoT platform. It will explore:

• how to configure a device
• how to create the IoT data model in Artik IoT that represents the structure used by Raspberry Pi to send data
• how to write the application that sends data to this IoT platform.

Artik IoT platform overview

This IoT platform supports several data exchange paradigms and provides different SDKs depending on the developing language you prefer.

The main features provided by Artik IoT are:

Artik is a well structured IoT platform, moreover, Artik cloud is a well-documented platform with useful and interesting example and you can have more information at this link. An interesting aspect of this platform is the cloud API that enables external devices to connect to this platform and exchanging data.

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Configure Raspberry Pi in Artik cloud

Before diving into the Raspberry Pi IoT project details, first of all, it is necessary to have an account to configure the device. The account is free. This tutorial is based on Raspberry Pi but the process of configuring the device is device agnostic. Once you are logged in, in the Samsung Artik IoT dashboard, you have to click on the device and start configuring it:

It is important you add a unique name so that your device can be identified. That’s all, you have created your first device ready to send sensor values. The next step is configuring the data model using the Manifest.

Implement Artik IoT data model

This is an important aspect because it is necessary to configure in Artik the variables we want to handle in our IoT project. In other words, in this step, we are defining the basic information handled in our Raspberry Pi IoT project. These variables are sent by the device (i.e Raspberry Pi) to the cloud and they represent the parameter we measure using the sensors.

This IoT project based on Raspberry Pi uses two sensors (to make it simple):

• DHT11
• BMP180

The first sensor, DHT11, measures the temperature and humidity while the second one, BMP180, measures the temperature and the pressure.  Later in this post, we cover how to connect them to Raspberry Pi so that we can read the physical parameters. By now,  it is important to know this Raspberry Pi IoT project uses three different parameters:

These are the variables we have to configure in Artik IoT cloud platform. The steps to configure them are described below:

In this case, we add the temperature field that will hold the temperature values coming from the DHT11 sensor. To add the other parameters you can repeat the same steps. At the end you will have:

Now you can activate your manifest!!!

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How to use sensors in Raspberry Pi IoT project

The configuration steps are now completed, the next step is connected Raspberry Pi to sensors. Be aware of the wiring otherwise, you could damage your device or sensors. The connection between Raspberry Pi and the two sensors is shown in the pictures below:

To use these sensors is important you install wiringPi library. The code used to send data to Artik IoT platform is written in NodeJS but you could use other languages too. Before reading sensors values, it is necessary to install two NodeJS libraries:

• raspi-sensors
• node-dht-sensor

These two libraries help you to read easily sensor values. First of all, let us import them:

[javascript]var sensor = require(‘node-dht-sensor’);
var RaspiSensors = require(‘raspi-sensors’);[/javascript]

Now we can read the sensors:

[javascript]var BMP180 = new RaspiSensors.Sensor({
type: ‘BMP180’,
address: 0x77
}, ‘BMP180’);

BMP180.fetchInterval(function(err, data) {

if (data.type == ‘Temperature’) {
console.log("Temperature ["+data.value+"]");
}
else if (data.type == ‘Pressure’) {
console.log("Pressure ["+data.value+"]");
var data = {"Press": data.value };
}
}, 5);[/javascript]

While to read DHT11, you have to write:

[javascript]setInterval(function() {
var readout = sensor.read();
console.log(‘Temp:’ + readout.temperature.toFixed(2)
+ "Hum:" + readout.humidity.toFixed(2));
}, 2000);[/javascript]

That’s all. The next step is sending the data to the Artik IoT.

Send Raspberry Pi sensor values to the Artik cloud

Finally, we are ready to send the sensor data to the cloud. It is important to notice that the device must be authenticated before it can send data. To do it, we need to use a secret token and the device Id that we get from the cloud IoT platform clicking on the device we have created previously.

First, let’s connect using Websocket:

[javascript] var artikUrl="wss:api.artik.cloud/v1.1/websocket?ack=true";
function connect() {
// connecting
ws = new WebSocket(artikUrl);
ws.on(‘open’, function() {
console.log("Connected…");
registerDevice();
});
ws.on(‘message’, function(data, flags) {
console.log("Message [" + data + "]");
});
ws.on(‘close’, function() {
console.log("Websocket is closed");
});
}[/javascript]

As you can notice as soon as the connection is established we register the device.

[javascript]// Register the Raspberry device first
function registerDevice() {
try {
console.log("Registering device..");
var message = ‘{"sdid": "d5f71b368bf148xxx","type": "register",
"Authorization": "bearer fcf3bf9cbf7d49xxx","cid":"1983274" }’;
console.log("Message: " + message);
ws.send(message, {mask:true});
console.log("Device registered");
}
catch(e) {
console.error("Exception while sending data…");
}
}[/javascript]

Finally, the method to send the sensor values to Artik cloud:

[javascript]function sendMessage(message) {
console.log("Sending data to artik…");
try {
var payload = ‘{"sdid": "d5f71b368bf148c9xxxxx", "ts":"’ + Date.now().toString() + ‘","data":’
+ JSON.stringify(message) + ‘}’;
console.log("Message: " + payload);
ws.send(payload, {mask:true});
console.log("Message sent");
}
catch(e) {
console.error("Exception while sending data…");
console.log(e.toString());
}
}[/javascript]

Where sdid is the device id used before and the data is the JSON message holding the values coming from the sensors.

The last step is creating the message that holds the information managed by this Raspberry Pi IoT project. We create the message as soon as we get the data from the sensor, for example for the temperature we have:

[javascript]var data = {"Temp": readout.temperature.toFixed(2),
"Hum": readout.humidity.toFixed(2)}; [/javascript]

We do the same thing for the pressure.

[javascript]var data = {"Press": data.value };[/javascript]

As soon as you start the NodeJS app, it begins sending data to the Artik IoT platform. Accessing to the Artik IoT dashboard you can verify the data and create charts:

At the end of this post describing how to build your first Raspberry Pi IoT project, you gained the knowledge about Artik IoT platform and how to use it to develop a complete IoT project.