I consider the Internet of Things (IoT) a superhero: mostly invisible, yet it makes our life better at work, socially, and personally. Superheroes have the tremendous power to be there for you wherever you need them, whether it’s in cities, hospitals, educational institutions, manufacturing plants, farms, or any place you can have in mind. Sounds a lot like the Internet of Things, don’t you think?
Let’s put ourselves in Natalia’s shoes. Natalia works in the agricultural sector using Pig Vision, an intelligent camera that integrates artificial intelligence and neural networks. With this device, she can get real-time metrics about the weighing process on the farms without stressing the pigs. What if Natalia needs to access the data but does not have internet access at that precise moment? Here’s where the Vonage Messages API comes in-what if Natalia requests the data she needs via SMS?
Nowadays, there are many messaging services and visualization platforms that make technology more accessible to everyone; we do not need to be expert engineers to create innovative solutions. In addition, these services allow you to deploy complete solutions in a matter of hours. Taking Natalia’s use case as a reference, as well as all the data-based needs that can exist across industries, I thought it would be great to have a system capable of performing real-time monitoring of device data independent of internet access.
In this tutorial, I’m going to share detailed steps to build this system using the Vonage Messages API as a messaging service and Ubidots as an IoT Platform. As a starting point, let’s understand the architecture to be implemented:
The integration of these services is made through an UbiFunction, a Serverless Computing Environment which will allow us to receive the message sent to our virtual number over an HTTP request. We’re then able to analyze it to identify the devices and the variables requested in order to send the last value received for each requested variables as a reply.
Undoubtedly, this system will be useful for different use cases. Just get a little bit creative to identify where it can be useful for the project you are working on. Without further ado, let’s get started!
#ubidots #vonage #iot #sms #api
