3 Steps to Build Your IoT Demo

December 4, 2020

Blog

3 Steps to Build Your IoT Project

Want to know the environment condition of your greenhouse, server room, factory or substation of electricity from anywhere and anytime? Thanks to the IoT technology, your IoT concept can be easily realized.

Today, we’re going to show you how to build a simple IoT demonstration in just 3 steps by using an industrial temperature & humidity sensor, Bivocom industrial 4g IoT gateway TG451, and Fogwing Industrial IoT platform (www.fogwing.io).

Get Your IoT Hardware and IoT Platform Ready

An industrial temperature and humidity sensor can detect field conditions and convert it to digital signal. In our case, the sensor acquires the field environment temperature and humidity, transfer the data via RS485 interface following Modbus RTU protocol which is very common in IoT technology.

An industrial cellular IoT gateway or modem comes with RS485, and support protocols like Modbus RTU/TCP, JSON and MQTT. In this case, we use a Bivocom 4G IoT gateway TG451 to connect to the sensor via RS485, and acquire the data from sensor, convert it from Modbus to JSON, and transmit to a cloud MQTT server. For more details of TG451, please refer https://www.bivocom.com/products/iot-gateways/industrial-gateway-tg451/

A Cloud IoT platform. Fogwing is a feature-rich, and ease to use IoT platform, which supports MQTT protocols. Fogwing also provides visible dashboard and alarm trigger features. You may need to register a free account from https://enterprise.fogwing.net

Step 1,

Deploy the temperature & humidity sensor at place you plan to monitor, and then connect it to Bivocom TG451 gateway via RS485 port.

Sensor and TG451

Step 2,

Configure the TG451 gateway to get sensor data and upload to cloud server Fogwing. Bivocom TG451 provides user friendly Web UI for configuration. For initialization setup, please refer QSG(quick start guide) from Bivocom.

Login to the Web UI of TG451, enable the ‘Data Collect’ feature, and set the period of data collection and report period according to your demand.

Configure the relevant interface parameters, Bivocom TG451 provides RS232, RS485, Ethernet, DI/DO(relay). In our case, we use RS485 COM port to connect to sensor, set the relevant Baud rate, Data bit, and other parameters following sensor datasheet.

Configure the Modbus Rules at Web UI>>Data Collect>> Modbus Rules Setting, following the sensor’s Modbus map, set the Device ID, Function code, Register address, holding length (count), and other parameters (click “Edit” button for more settings), to get and calculate the correct Temperature and Humidity value accordingly.

We will get the MQTT access information from Fogwing platform after register TG451 device on Fogwing portal. If you want to know about steps to create device and access, you may explore the Fogwing documentation here: https://docs.fogwing.io/

Input the MQTT information of Fogwing on TG451 server setting, and set JSON format as platform requested.

Step 3,

After finished the TG451 gateway settings, the sensor data will be published to Fogwing platform periodically, access the dashboard of cloud IoT platform anytime and anywhere, all the real time data is under monitored now.

Dashboard on Fogwing