Installing
In order to install Rhiot mini gateway on one of supported gateway platforms (like Raspberry Pi with Raspbian) use Rhiot cmd tool (rhiot cmd section describes how to install Rhiot cmd). After Rhiot cmd tool is installed, connect your device to your local network (using WiFi or the ethernet cable) and execute the following command on a laptop connected to the same network as your target device:
From this point forward Rhiot gateway will be installed on your device as rhiot-gateway service and started whenever the device boots up. Under the hood, gateway deployer performs the simple port scanning in the local network and attempts to connect to supported devices using the default SSH credentials.
To learn more about a gateway deployment tool, see rhiot gateway-deploy command section. To learn about the other useful Rhiot cmd commands, see rhiot cmd section.
Configuration of the gateway
The gateway configuration file is /etc/default/rhiot-gateway. This file is loaded by the gateway starting script. It means that all the configuration environment variables can be added here. For example to set the foo_bar_baz configuration property to value qux, the following environment variable should be added to the /etc/default/rhiot-gateway file:
Gateway logger configuration
By default gateway keeps the last 100 MB of the logging history. Logs are grouped by the days and split into the 10 MB files. The default logging level is INFO. You can change it by setting the camellabs_iot_gateway_log_root_level environment variable:
Device heartbeats
Camel gateway generates heartbeats indicating that the device is alive and optionally connected to the data center.
The default heartbeat rate is 5 seconds, which means that heartbeat events will be generated every 5 second. You can change the heartbeat rate by setting the camellabs_iot_gateway_heartbeat_rate environment variable to the desired number of the rate miliseconds. The snippet below demonstrates how to change the heartbeat rate to 10 seconds:
The heartbeat events are broadcasted to the Vert.x event bus address heartbeat ( io.rhiot.gateway.GatewayConstants.BUS_HEARTBEAT constant).
Logging heartbeat
By default Camel gateway sends the heartbeat event to the application log (at the INFO level). Logging heartbeats are useful when verifying that gateway is still running - you can just take a look into the application log files. The name of the logger is io.rhiot.gateway.heartbeat.LoggingHeartbeatVerticle and the message is Ping!.
MQTT heartbeat
Camel IoT gateway can send the heartbeat events to the data center using the MQTT protocol. MQTT heartbeats are useful when verifying that gateway is still running and connected to the backend services deployed into the data center.
In order to enable the MQTT-based heartbeats set the camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.mqtt environment variable to true. Just as demonstrated on the snippet below:
The address of the target MQTT broker can be set using the camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.mqtt.broker.url environment variable, just as demonstrated on the example below:
By default MQTT heartbeat sends events to the heartbeat topic. You can change the name of the topic using the camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.mqtt.topic environment variable. For example to send the heartbeats to the myheartbeats queue set the camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.mqtt.topic environment variable as follows:
The heartbeat message format is hostname:timestamp, where hostname is the name of the device host and timestamp is the current time converted to the Java miliseconds.
LED heartbeat
Heartbeats can blink the LED node connected to the gateway device. This is great visual indication that the gateway software is still up and running. For activating LED heartbeat set camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.led property to true. Like this
The LED output port can be set via camellabs.iot.gateway.heartbeat.led.gpioId environment variable, Default value is 0 wiring lib pin index Change LED output port like this:
Please add resistor (220 Ohms) between LED and Mass (0v) to avoid excessive current through it.
Last updated