The AndPlus Innovation Lab is where our passion projects take place. Here, we explore promising technologies, cultivate new skills, put novel theories to the test and more — all on our time (not yours).
Large IoT deployments typically involve the setup and configuration of several servers for communication, data storage, and administration resulting in a high upfront cost for organizations. The Amazon AWS IoT platform eliminates these with it's pre-built platform and instead charges a fractional fee per IoT device. The simplicity of the dashboard within AWS, combined with their first class documentation, allowed for rapid development and feature exploration. The tools provided to connect to the MQTT broker and to test the message flow allowed for a web based client to be developed in just a few hours with a small feature set. It's worth noting that AWS's platform goes far beyond what was utilized in this project. The IoT analytics platform that they provide allows for the piping of data into different channels for manipulation and storage. The temperature data in this project could flow into that process to be consumed by a future machine learning project.
Our IoT configuration was built using a series of Raspberry Pi's running the Windows IoT platform. The software for the devices was written in C# with some C++ used for reading the temperature and humidity data in real time via a DHT22 temperature sensor. The data was transmitted back to the AWS MQTT broker and displayed in the React based administration panel by using a subscription to the MQTT stream.
AndPlus understands the communication between building level devices and mobile devices and this experience allowed them to concentrate more on the UI functions of the project. They have built a custom BACnet MS/TP communication stack for our products and are looking at branching to other communication protocols to meet our market needs. AndPlus continues to drive our product management to excellence, often suggesting more meaningful approaches to complete a task, and offering feedback on UI and Human Interface based on their knowledge from past projects.
