Devices

What are Devices?

A device is logical container of physical measurements. It includes hardware and software that directly interacts with the world. They connect to a network to communicate with eachother or to cloud. Devices might be directly or indirectly (through a gateway) connected to the cloud.

Sensors and Actuators are connected to the device (or integrated in its hardware). These sensors and actuators are called the Assets of the device and are graphically represented in Maker using Controls on a Pinboard.

When you click on a 'Device' in your AllThingsTalk account, you will see the following view:

Asset overview: List of all assets for this device.
Charts: Graph showing historical data of one or more assets.
Create pinboard: Creates a default pinboard for this device, pinning one default control for each asset.
Device settings: Access device settings to get information about:
1. Authentication: Device ID & Device Token
2. Network information: Details of parameters important for the networks
3. Data Decoding: Any logic built in ABCL to decode raw data
4. Access to device technical documentation
5. Sharing settings to share device & data with other grounds
Asset: One asset block, showing this assets parameters and value.
Asset actions: Delete, rename or view the asset details. For actuators, you can also send a command here.
New asset: Create a new asset.

Create device

LoRaWAN

To create a device

Go to the ground in which you want to create it and select the Devices tab on the left
Click the large New device button
Select the type of device you want to create
Select your LoRaWAN provider
Enter a name for your device
Enter the DEVEUI

You will receive the DEVEUI after creating the device at the LoRaWAN provider.

Under Add Keys, enter the

DevAddr
Network Session Key
App Session key

They can be found under the LoRaWAN Server provider account you have selected. The keys are not mandatory but it is useful to enter them in the screen below. This will allow us to auto-generate code for you and it might come in handy for your own reference.

Hit CONNECT

For more info on how to set up your device with your Server provider, please check the corresponding LoRaWAN Network section under Tutorials.

WiFi / LAN

AllThingsTalk Kits

To create a device

Go to the ground in which you want to create it and select the Devices tab on the left
Click the large New device button
Select the type of device you want to create

Done! Your device is now created, together with two basic assets to help you set up your first basic IoT demo. To get this demo running, please check the corresponding Quick Start tutorial.

Your own hardware

To create a device

Go to the ground in which you want to create it and select the Devices tab on the left
Click the large New device button
Select the type of device you want to create
Enter a name for your device

Your device is now created and you are provided with its Device id, on top of your Client Id and Client key.

Debug device data

Sometimes devices stop working for one or another reason and you need to know what’s going on. Also, many devices (e.g. Arduino) memory is small enough to discourage an attempt to log errors on the device itself. For that reason AllThingsTalk allows you to know if system successfully receives or encounters a problem with incoming data.

System logs a debug message whenever:

it receives binary data that has been successfully decoded (lorawan devices only)
it receives binary data that cannot be decoded due to false conversion definition (lorawan devices only)

Start debugging

Go to your device page, and start debugging session by choosing DEBUG tab. That will start tracing log messages that your device sends to the Cloud.
Debug messages are transient, so once you get our of DEBUG tab, the session will stop and messages will be gone. You can clear the log by clicking Clear.

Filtering out debug messages

By default, debug log shows information and error messages coming from your devices. If your debug log gets big and messy, you can filter out information messages by selecting Errors in debug view. You can also enter a debug message keywords to filter by search.

Exporting debug messages

You can select Export to download .txt document with message log from your current debug session.

Delete device

When you delete a device, all its assets will be deleted and all rules connected to the device become invalid! You might want to delete any rules linked to the device as well.