node-red-contrib-ibm-watson-iot

A pair of Node-RED nodes for connecting to the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform as a Device or Gateway.

Install

Run the following command in the user directory of your Node-RED install. This is usually ``~/.node-red`.

npm install node-red-contrib-ibm-watson-iot

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Supported Features

Feature	Supported?	Description
Device connectivity	✔	Connect your device(s) to Watson IoT Platform with ease using this library. Click here for detailed information on how devices can publish events and handle commands.
Gateway connectivity	✔	Connect your gateway(s) to Watson IoT Platform with ease using this library. Click here for detailed information on how gateways can publish events and handle commands for itself and for the attached devices.
SSL/TLS support	✔	By default, this library connects your devices, gateways and applications securely to Watson IoT Platform registered service. Ports 8883(default one) and 443 support secure connections using TLS with the MQTT and HTTP protocol. Also, note that the library uses port 1883(unsecured) to connect to the Quickstart service.
Client side Certificate based authentication	✔	Default connections between devices and the platform use either the Certificates Only or Certificates with Authentication Tokens security levels.
Auto reconnect	✔	Enables device and gateway to automatically reconnect to Watson IoT Platform while they are in a disconnected state. Further details here.
Multi-format support	✔	The format of the event defaults to JSON, but can be set to another value or, if left blank, can be set by the msg.format property.
Device Management	✘	Currently not supported.
Websocket	✘	Currently not supported.

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Usage

Input Node

The input node receive device commands from the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform.

The node can connect as either a Device or Gateway:

• Device: the node can be configured to either receive all commands for the Device, or just select a specific command type.
• Gateway: the node can be configured to receive commands for all devices connected through the gateway, or to select a subset of them.

The message sent by this node will include the following properties:

• payload - the body of the command. If the command was identified as json, this property will be a JavaScript object, otherwise it will be a string.
• topic - the topic the command was received on
• command - the command name
• format - the format of the command
• deviceType - (gateway only) the type of device the command is for
• deviceId - (gateway only) the id of the device the command is for

Output Node

Send device events to the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform.

The node can connect as either a Device or Gateway, in registered mode or using the Quickstart service.

When connecting using the Quickstart service, the connection will use a device type of node-red-ibmwiotp and a randomly generated device id, which can be configured in the node. The events from the node can then be viewed on the Quickstart dashboard.

The type of the event sent can be configured in the node or, if left blank, can be set by the msg.event property.

The format of the event defaults to json, but can be set to another value or, if left blank, can be set by the msg.format property.

The data for the event is taken from msg.payload. If format is set to json, this node will attempt to encode the data appropriately:

• If the data is an Object of the form: { d: { ... }} it will be used as-is. Similarly if it is a string representation of such an object no further encoding will be done.
• For any other type of object, for example a Number, it will be sent as {"d":{"value":123}}

If format is set to anything else, the data will be passed on as-is.

When connected as a Gateway, the type and id of the Device the event is being sent on behalf of can be configured in the node or, if left blank, can be set by the msg.deviceType and msg.deviceId properties. If these properties are not provided, either in the node or the message, it will use the type and id of the Gateway itself.

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