From Device to Cloud Dashboard with Cellular IoT - On Demand Webinar

Speaker: Cristina Botero - Business Development and Partners Manager - Ubidots 00:00

Hello, everybody, we're very excited to be here. We can see some familiar names, but if you're actually new to both Blues Wireless and Ubidots, let me say welcome. It's an honor for us to be here with you today. Basically, if you are an avid maker/developer or just an IoT entrepreneur, and you love easy things that are both easy and scalable, this is the right place for you. Of course, if you love stellar and beautiful dashboards, so right now, we're here with Blues Wireless and Ubidots. I need to introduce myself. I'm Cristina, Business Development and Partners Manager at Ubidots. Blues Wireless is definitely one of the most exciting partnerships we’ve been carrying out this year, both because we love the product, and we love the team behind it. I'm also here with David.

Speaker: David Sepulveda - Customer Success Leader - Ubidots

Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name is David. I’m the Customer Success Leader at Ubidots, and I'm really happy to be here. To be honest, I enjoyed preparing this webinar. I already told Rob and the Blues team how awesome the product is, so I hope you enjoy it just as I did.

Speaker: Cristina Botero

And we're here with Rob. Rob, do you want to introduce yourself real quick?

Speaker: Rob Lauer - Director of Developer Relations - Blues Wireless

Yeah, Hi everybody. Cristina, did you have another slide? Or should I start presenting mine?

Speaker: David Sepulveda

We have another slide.

Speaker: Rob Lauer

Okay. Anyway, hello, everyone. I'm Rob Lauer. I'm the Developer Relations Lead at Blues Wireless, and I'm super happy to be here with you all.

Speaker: Cristina Botero

Perfect. Thanks, Rob. Okay, folks, so today’s agenda, we're going to take around 45 minutes. First, we're going to carry out an Ubidots intro very quick, then Rob is going to continue with the Blues product overview. Then we're going to show you a real-world project that we carried out. It's very cool. And of course, Q&A, so feel free to drop your questions. We want to make this a conversation, so thanks again for being here.

Starting with an Ubidots introduction, in case you are not familiar with Ubidots yet. We are an IoT application enablement platform. We basically provide a whole set of backend and frontend tools from device-friendly APIs to a very clean UI for end users. We offer a whole set of tools for IoT entrepreneurs, system integrators, or OEMs, to be able to develop and launch entire IoT solutions without the need to hire a software development team, spend thousands of dollars, or even worse time to market. Since we launched in 2014, we've been on a mission to enable the data-driven future today. We basically have a two-tiered approach: First, we offer Ubidots STEM, these are free licenses for three devices, so it's basically meant for non-commercial products or academia. For instance, you want to brew your own beer at home, or you're studying at, I don't know, a Ph.D., we have a bunch of cases here, and more than 100,000 developers that have worked with us so far. On the other side, we have our commercial deployments, where we basically provide our licenses that are meant to fit any IoT project out there, whether you're prototyping or scaling. It starts at $49 and goes to $199, where you can basically offer a whole customer’s platform under a white label. This is not about the sales; if you're curious, go to Ubidots.com/pricing. We're basically convinced about the infinite creative power out there of people solving local problems using global tools, and that's why we're here for. Without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to Rob, and he's going to give us a brief overview about Blues Wireless products as well.

Speaker: Rob Lauer  03:53

All right, just had to make sure I was properly unmuted and my slides were showing. So hello, everybody again, and thanks for that introduction, Cristina. Again, my name is Rob Lauer. I'm the Developer Relations Lead at Blues Wireless. I really wanted to start off my segment here by kind of overtly emphasizing the developer focus of Blues Wireless. While I can't speak for Ubidots directly, my experience with them has been very similar in terms of the tech stack and developer nature. I don't know about y'all, but this really means something to me. Everything we do, from engineering through marketing is really focused on solving real-world problems with authentic solutions. For Blues, this really starts with this problem of network connectivity, specifically cellular IoT connectivity today. Very common situation, right? You're gathering device data, so you need a means of delivering that data to the cloud. The first question is likely why cellular? Well, it's a great question, because there are numerous perfectly valid connectivity options for your IoT projects today. You've got Wi-Fi modules you can use, you’ve got wired Ethernet, LoRa, other LPWAN technologies, even BLE, or Bluetooth. Then you have cellular. Of course, each of these options has its pros and cons, right? Wi-Fi has amazing availability indoors but relatively heavy power consumption for the modules. Wired Ethernet: like Wi-Fi, high bandwidth low latency is fantastic, but it’s certainly not mobile. LoRa: fantastic for that kind of low power and wide area when it's available. BLE: great for device-to-device communication, but reliability, it's kind of sketchy. Connections aren't super reliable with BLE.

Similar to LoRa, Sigfox has that kind of low power high range niche nailed, but again, availability is not so great. Then you have cellular: amazing global coverage, it’s ubiquitous, but it's not great for high bandwidth or low latency needs, especially in IoT scenarios. You kind of look at all these, and you blur your eyes a bit and there's no clear, obvious winner. It really all depends on your own individual requirements or your project’s requirements. I'm here to propose that maybe it's not so much a zero sum or either/or kind of situation. I should emphasize if you're satisfied with your current connection method, that's great. Keep using it. But maybe, just maybe, there are some scenarios where cellular provides more value than you might realize. What kind of stands out to me as the most useful scenarios for cellular are these things like global connectivity. If your solution is on the move—maybe it's something like asset tracking. I really like to think about vaccine shipments, which not only need location-based tracking but really active temperature and humidity and maybe even fall detection. You can't do this kind of active tracking without a global cellular network. There's also power independence, so a power-independent network. If your solution monitors some critically important function, maybe it's fire, smoke, carbon monoxide, security, any of those, what happens when the power goes out? Does your solution just stop reporting? Well, cellular of course, is ideal because it isn't dependent upon local networking hardware to be active. If your solution is battery powered, so is your network connection. Data security: when done right, your data doesn't even need to traverse across the internet. It can go directly from carrier to your cloud provider. Cellular is incredibly robust and reliable, so it can also act as a great backup connectivity option as well. However, to date, developers have been really afraid of cellular. Businesses have been afraid of cellular for some different reasons. Developers, of course, are afraid of having to use these archaic modem AT commands—kind of feels like you're writing in assembly at times, frankly—or maybe the opposite problem: They lose all control and are subject to the host hardware’s abstraction. Now businesses, on the other hand, they're afraid for more monetary reasons. Say you buy 200 devices with 200 unique data plans. On day one, the meter starts running, and you're paying however much per month forever, regardless of the stage of your product, whether you're just experimenting, or maybe you're prototyping or you're deploying in the field. This is all really where the Notecard from Blues Wireless comes in. Putting my developer hat on, I'm really excited about what we're doing to help make cellular a more viable choice.

Case in point, the Notecard is a cellular- and GPS-enabled device-to-cloud data pump. It's a tiny system on module, like literally 30 millimeters by 35 millimeters, and it ships ready to embed in a project via that M.2 edge connector. To make things much easier for you, we also provide a series of Notecard host expansion boards called Notecarriers. There are different models of the Notecarrier depending on the microcontroller or single-board computer you're using. Finally, the Notecard comes pre-configured to securely communicate with Notehub. This is a Blues Wireless service that enables this secure device-to-cloud data flow. Notecards are assigned to a project in Notehub, which then syncs data in those projects for routing to your cloud of choice. I like to think that Notecard is both business and developer friendly: $49 one-time cost per device. That does include 500 MBs of data and 10 years of cellular service, and yes, you can top up your data as needed.

More importantly, though, you're using the microcontroller or single-board computers you're already invested in. We support STM32, ESP32 boards, Adafruit Feather, Raspberry Pi, you name it, and connecting to your cloud application of choice is practically turnkey. We have a variety of tutorials available if you're curious about some examples of connecting your Notecard data to your own cloud application. Again, the developer nature, the developer-focused nature of Blues, you're programming your Notecard with requests and responses in JSON. So here is an example of an event, or a Note, as we call them, that's sending some recorded sensor data to the cloud. In this case, just a temperature reading. We also have open-source libraries for Python, Arduino, C and C++. Okay, so you have this event, or this Note, full of data that's ready to be sent to the cloud.

Now, you're probably going to end up in one of four camps. The data you have on the Notecard, all you want to do is log that in Notehub and that's it, end of story. As you'll see in a little bit here, you can go into Notehub, you can browse that data, and you can export it to CSV or JSON for offline processing. You know, that is an option. For most of us though, the data in that Note or in those events needs to be routed to a third-party cloud application. This is handled by something called routes in Notehub. A route can be configured to simply take that Note and handle all the boring background noise and tasks and deliver it to your cloud of choice. So maybe that cloud is AWS, maybe it's Azure, or like today, it's a data visualization solution, like Ubidots. Maybe it's multiple clouds even. Related to number two, maybe your Note needs to be routed to that cloud application, but the data needs to be kind of massaged or transformed first. Notehub allows you to transform your JSON data using JSONata before being delivered to your cloud app. Finally, maybe your use case is a little more complicated. Maybe multiple events need to be combined into one Note, or maybe there's a third-party API you want to hit to add data to a Note before it gets saved in your cloud app. Whatever it may be, Notecard also has a PUT or has multiple PUT/POST/GET APIs that allow you to fully customize how, when, where, what gets delivered to Notehub. On that note, what I'd like to do is show off some Notecard features for you today. That's it for slides. Let me stop sharing my screen for a second and go through the awkward transition here.

Speaker: Rob 13:26

Okay, so this is dev.blues.io, and if I connect to my device here, you'll see—let me expand my window a little bit—here's our in-browser terminal. Again, no local installations of any tools required here. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is issue just a simple command, all JSON. The command is going to be a request, and it's going to use the card.version API. All JSON in, all JSON back out. What this simply does, this just proves out, I'm actually literally connected to my board. This gives me the firmware version on the board, some other metadata, the device ID, and such. I just wanted to prove that I'm actually connected to the board. Now, recall that Notehub is that cloud service for managing Notecard data. Prior to this demo, I created a project in Notehub that'll show up in a minute, but I do want to initialize my project on this Notecard by issuing what's called a hub.set request. Now I'm going to copy and paste because I don't trust my typing skills live.

Now, if you look closely here, you'll see this hub.set is the API we're hitting, and then I'm sending a product here. This is the unique, the globally unique product ID for my project in Notehub, so it's going to associate that project with this Notecard. I'm going to put the card in continuous mode; continuous means maintain a continuous cellular connection. Great for demos, great for wired scenarios as well, not so great if you're on battery power, which is why we also provide a separate mode called periodic that you can use to be a little more power sipping. I issue the request, and what's returned is an empty JSON object. That means it was a successful request. Now that I have my project all set up, the first thing I'm going to do is probably add some data to Notehub. What I can do is use the note.add API. I'm going to submit a note.add request, and in the body of that request is any data I want to send, so anything in a key value pair.

Again, in this scenario, I'm just sending some temperature data, some mocked up temperature data, obviously. I'm also optionally specifying a sync equals true parameter. What this will do is it will tell my Notecard to immediately sync this with the cloud. Again, this is great for demos and again, wired scenarios with continuous cellular connections, but if you're in the battery mode, or in periodic mode rather, running on battery, you don't necessarily want to do this as it'll chew into your battery a little bit more. I submitted the note.add request, and you can see what was returned is that one Note was synced with Notehub, which is awesome. Now, let's add a few more Notes here, but I'm going to remove that sync parameter and let's just throw a few more in here. There's one, and here's another reading. You can see that total is increasing, so there's Notes that are being stored on the Notecard. To sync those with the cloud, or with Notehub manually, I can issue a hub.sync request.

This is going to say, “Grab all those accumulated Notes on the Notecard, shoot them up to Notehub.” You can probably imagine pretty quickly here, you're using Raspberry Pi or whatever microcontroller you're using, you’re writing MicroPython or whatever language you're using, creating Notes based on some sensor data. Using these exact same commands, using the Python or Arduino library that we provide, but of course with a simpler, fluent API. I've got all this data going to Notehub, so let me pop over to my Notehub projects. Now the first thing you'll notice about Notehub is that everything is project based. These are all my test projects I've created already. Each project can have one or more devices associated with it. There's even the capability to manage fleets of devices. So let me pop into my webinar project. First thing you see are the devices that have been connected historically. Here's the device that we are using right now, as you can see, just 30 seconds ago it was last seen. If I go to the Events window, we can see all these Notes that we just created. These have been synced with the cloud. Now I can filter out some of the other noise that comes with these cellular sessions to see only the data that I submitted. It all looks pretty good there, so we can dive into some Event Details to see metadata about the Note information: when it was captured, the location of the cell tower that was used, the body of the Note, which of course is exactly what we sent it, and the full JSON with all the metadata attached to the Note.

What I'd like to do is, there's so much more that can be done in Notehub. There are capabilities like OTA firmware updates for both the host microcontroller and Notecard as well, but I do want to show a couple of features that I think are really nice to have. There is this member panel as well that provides for role-based access to your project so you can provision access to your project to other users. There are also what I think is one of the more underutilized features of Notehub: environment variables. These environment variables can be device specific, fleet specific or project specific. Imagine you want to set some kind of key value pair to an individual device to identify it in some unique way. Maybe set a specific sensor threshold on that device. You can use environment variables for this or anything else you can dream up. What's important today is routing my data to a cloud application. I think at this point, I'd like to hand it back over to David to show some more real-world examples of how Ubidots enables this creation of really engaging cloud dashboards. I'm going to pass it back to you, David.

Speaker: David Sepulveda  19:29

Yep, I'm here, attentive. Okay. All right, and here we go. Awesome. Before I jump into the routing process that we're going to take over here, I just would like to point out that it's been like two weeks since I met you guys personally. I read your docs and I understand your product. I want everybody to know that if you go through their documentation, you'll find this really, really easy to understand. I can't believe that you just took like 20 minutes to explain all the things I've read in three hours. So that means your product is so well done. With no further ado, what we're going to do right now is simply go over the route integration, which is simply creating a webhook—let me just make sure I'm here—an HTTP webhook that will take the data coming from the Notecard, then to Blues Notehub, wrapping it up in a compatible JSON using JSONata that I will show you how that works, and finally, we'll go to Ubidots. It’s really easy. I believe it's really simple. Let me just show you how that works. Yes, this is really simple. We are going to be using of course, Notehub. The guys at Blues shared a project with me called simply Partner Showcase. If I click on it, I will see some devices, one is this one. Let me see if this is sending data. I believe it's sending. Let's go to Events, as Rob told us, yeah, this one is sending humidity and temperature every five minutes.

Our goal is to take this data, parse it into an Ubidots-compatible JSON and see it within our platform. How can we do that? We go to Route; as you can see, there are already two in place that I used to test before this webinar. I'm going to create one from scratch. It's really simple. Add a route here. Then we go to webinar to name it Webinar Test. As Rob said before, I'm also terrible at typing live, so I just prepared myself to have all these things in my clipboard. I'm going to paste the Blues URL in this field; you'll see that it matches our API that you can visit at docs.ubidots.com. You'll see there how to send data, and we basically simply use our URL, and let me point to something really important. You can access this dynamic key called device, and it will tell the unique global device UI from Blues and use it within Ubidots as the API layer. So you don't need to think about naming or labeling your devices within Ubidots. Simply take this from Blues, and the job will be done by them. Then we will select all fleets—that means all devices within the project—we will select all Notes—no, we don’t want that—we actually want Select Notes. In this case, the Note I'm looking for is called sensor.qo. That means the file that is being sent from the Notecard to Notehub, and it has that JSON I told you about before, which is simply temperature and humidity. I'm going to type that up here. Okay, sensor.qo, and next, something really cool that I just learned a couple of weeks ago and is the transformation portion. We will use something called JSONata that allows us to take the native Blues JSON and convert it into an Ubidots-compatible one. I'm going to select here JSONata Expression. Before I go to the expression, I will show you how this works and what can be done with this. I have a couple of examples here—going to expand—so this is the native JSON provided by Blues Wireless. As you can see, it has a lot of data in the body key. I'm going to select it so you guys can see it really easily. This is the data coming from the device, right? We need to take that along with this key, the when key, which tells us the timestamp of the data, and make it into an Ubidots-compatible JSON that looks just like this one.

There you go. You have all the variables that correspond to their respective values and the timestamp in milliseconds. As a matter of fact, this data I'm showing you right now is from another project that we will present to you just in a couple of minutes. You can get really creative with the JSONata expressions. Zach, a developer from Blues made this up, which I need to be honest, I don't understand. This is a really complex JSONata expression that simply takes that data coming from the device and parses it into an Ubidots-compatible one. You'll see that there are functions that simply operate once the data is in Notehub. In this case, I don't know what it's doing, but it does it, and it converts everything to an Ubidots-compatible JSON. Moreover, you can find all the docs about JSONata here, in www.docs.jsonata.org. It is really simple, it's really easy to use, and really easy to read. Okay, so if we go back to our route configuration, we'll need to turn the native JSON from Blues and convert it into an Ubidots one. How we do that is simply paste in that. We will have two variables that are going to be labeled as temperature and humidity, and we'll take the values from the body that I showed you before. Let’s just see that again. It's here. Exactly. It will take the values from the body—this is coming from the Notecard—and put it into our JSONata expression. So body.temp and body.humidity, and of course, the timestamp. As you can see, it allows us to multiply the timestamp variable, which is when to convert it into milliseconds. It happens that Blues API gives that to us in seconds, but the Ubidots API receives that in milliseconds. It's a quick multiplication, and we are basically ready to go. Once I save this, all the data coming from the Notecard will be sent to our Ubidots account. We are ready. As this takes about five minutes—the device is reporting data every five minutes—I'm just going to jump into Ubidots and show you how it works and how it looks, as I have this one already working.

Speaker: David Sepulveda 26:56

There you go. You have all the variables that correspond to their respective values and the timestamp in milliseconds. As a matter of fact, this data I'm showing you right now is from another project that we will present to you just in a couple of minutes. You can get really creative with the JSONata expressions. Zach, a developer from Blues made this up, which I need to be honest, I don't understand. This is a really complex JSONata expression that simply takes that data coming from the device and parses it into an Ubidots-compatible one. You'll see that there are functions that simply operate once the data is in Notehub. In this case, I don't know what it's doing, but it does it, and it converts everything to an Ubidots-compatible JSON. Moreover, you can find all the docs about JSONata here, in www.docs.jsonata.org. It is really simple, it's really easy to use, and really easy to read. Okay, so if we go back to our route configuration, we'll need to turn the native JSON from Blues and convert it into an Ubidots one. How we do that is simply paste in that. We will have two variables that are going to be labeled as temperature and humidity, and we'll take the values from the body that I showed you before. Let’s just see that again. It's here. Exactly. It will take the values from the body—this is coming from the Notecard—and put it into our JSONata expression. So body.temp and body.humidity, and of course, the timestamp. As you can see, it allows us to multiply the timestamp variable, which is when to convert it into milliseconds. It happens that Blues API gives that to us in seconds, but the Ubidots API receives that in milliseconds. It's a quick multiplication, and we are basically ready to go. Once I save this, all the data coming from the Notecard will be sent to our Ubidots account. We are ready. As this takes about five minutes—the device is reporting data every five minutes—I'm just going to jump into Ubidots and show you how it works and how it looks, as I have this one already working. So let me go to Ubidots. We go directly to the device that is reporting this data. As you can see if I reload the page, it says the last activity was like an hour ago. I know that's not true, so—just a couple of seconds—yes, the last data was received five minutes ago. If I go into it, I will be able to see the plot. We've been receiving data in the last, I think, two weeks. You can simply go here and aggregate data if you want it. Let’s average… every 30 minutes. It will take some time to compute, and there you have it. But more importantly, you will be able to create dashboards, and that's something we're going to see just in a minute. I'm going to pass over again to Rob. He's going to explain the Earth Day project they've been working on the past few months. We have also that data in Ubidots. We took the opportunity to build an awesome dashboard that will be presented to you at the end, just to showcase how Ubidots can help you build IoT applications without the need of coding or a budget and going to market really quickly. So let me just stop my screen, and I give it up to Rob again.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

Excellent. Thank you, David. I did want to show off here really quickly, you know, we all know last week was Earth Day. To help kind of celebrate Earth Day, our own Zach Fields put together this fantastic stream research project: You can find the full details of the project on hackster.io. If you browse under featured projects, you'll see it. What Zach is doing here is really awesome. He's taking numerous water quality sensor readings with all sorts of different sensors. He put them in this one watertight orange box here, and he's measuring water quality in this stream before it reaches his town and then after it leaves town. This is going to help him measure the town's impact on water quality directly, so it's a really awesome citizen science project. I wanted to highlight the project, as I think it's one of the best examples we have of using multiple sensors—you can see there's a lot of hardware involved in this project—using those multiple sensors in a remote setting while also delivering live data over cellular to Notehub and to Ubidots. What I'd like to do actually is show off—David, if I'm not going to steal your thunder here—show off the dashboard that Zach has created, if that's cool with you.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Yeah, all you. Okay, just continue.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

What Zach has done here is used all these widgets, literally these out-of-the-box widgets from Ubidots to create a variety of different visualizations for all the sensor data that he's returning. Something as simple as a geolocation for the one location of the sensor box, water temperature here, pH level, you know, things I don't even understand, turbidity, dissolved oxygen levels, and I've seen this go up and down pretty dramatically, down to some more standard, you know, line graphs here. It's really cool what you're able to do in a matter of minutes, really, when this data is coming through in near real time. I mean, the other day, when I was testing this out, I can get data from a local Notecard device to show up in Ubidots in a matter of seconds. I mean, it's really that fast, which is pretty amazing. I can pass it back over to you all here.

Speaker: David Sepulveda 

Thank you. Okay, there we go. We took that data from the Earth Day project that Zach built the past few months, which I believe is an awesome project because it gives real-time data about the waterway of a town close to his home. It's really nice to monitor that and just be socially conscious about the water streams. As you can see in my presentation, I took the idea of the dashboard they already built and used a little bit more of Ubidot’s tools to create awesome dashboards, and that's what you're seeing in the screen. What I'm going to do right now is actually switch over to Ubidots and show you how you can build an application real quickly for your end users in a white label fashion. If I just go up here—this is what I want to show you—as you can see here, we are at industrial.Ubidots.com. That's what we call the application development side of Ubidots. Here's where you build everything for your end users and then you give access to them with certain router information that allows them to access the data. We like to call ourselves... we are an application builder or maybe a business-enabled platform from the IoT space. Now, we move to how this looks from the application, your application, and let's just remember that it's a white label application. Here, everything is changed. From the navbar, you have a new logo, and all the colors are inherited in the application. More importantly, we have something called roles. In this case, this user has all the permissions to build, edit, delete widgets, or create new resources within his account. But ideally, with a user management module, you can limit or scope that access to the resources that you're assigning to the user. At the end, I just wanted to show you that we are able to build a clean and neat dashboard that shows data easily so people can understand it. We have all the data coming from the Earth Day project just as Rob showed us before, but just with a little tweak to the dashboard to show how this can be really, really beautiful. At the end, we have just a Q&A session. Oh, actually, we have a call to action. Just give me one sec. I'm going to present my screen back, and Cris is going to give us directions.

Speaker: Cristina Botero  33:57

Awesome, David. Okay, so if you're wondering how to get started with Ubidots, if you haven't yet. First, it’s very easy with Ubidots and Blues Wireless of course, you can create a free trial anytime. You have a free 30 days and after you've done this, we have $50 in US dollars for your account credit. If you're actually willing to deploy the solutions in the market, we have a 75% off for the professional plan in order for you to do your white label. This is very nice, just some coupons we're offering, and it's very easy. Just reach out to [email protected], and we’re happy to apply discounts if you're a new user. Yeah, that was basically what we wanted to show you. Now we should be jumping into questions.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

Yes, we’ve got some questions to go through. I wanted to let everybody know too right now that within the next day or so you'll get a follow-up email with a list of all the resources we provided along with the appropriate discount codes from both Blues and Ubidots. I'm going to paste into the chat window here the discount code that you can use on the Blues Wireless store as well. That'll be in the email as well, but I wanted to make sure you all had access to it.

One common question we get on the Blues Wireless side is about global cellular connectivity and what that really means. We do maintain, we actively maintain a list of supported countries that are available in our documentation. I will dig up that link for you—I should have had that ready. We do have active cellular support through AT&T and its partners around the world. So yeah, when we say global, we do mean truly global cellular support there. I think what I can do is go through some of these questions here. I don't know if we'll have time for all of them. One of the first questions that we got was about using other IoT cellular offerings, and there's limitations depending on the carrier once you leave urban or suburban areas. The solution that this person saw involves an e-SIM that looks for the best signal across multiple carriers, which is totally valid. I know we've all been in that scenario before. The answer I can provide today from Blues is that we don't have anything at this time. We are on AT&T's network, but we're certainly always looking to evaluate our coverage and carrier network partners over time. We, of course, want to make sure that all of our customers have the best coverage possible. If you're in this scenario where AT&T is not a good option, at least in the US, or whatever partner providers are being used in other places in the world, definitely feel free to shoot us an email. I'll paste my email address in the chat window here as well. We always want to hear from you all about that.

An Ubidots-related question. This is an interesting one. I don’t really know the exact answer to this: “Can we get data from Ubidots and send it over to Notehub?” Kind of the opposite of what we've just been showing.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Awesome. I don't know who asked that, but I'm really happy you asked that. The answer is yes, you can use our events module to just simply trigger an alert of the type webhook, which is basically an HTTP request, and with that, you can hit Blues API and just wait until your device syncs. Once that happens, you will get the data down to your device. As a matter of fact, this is something I asked Brandon and Zach and Rob a couple of weeks ago, how I can do that. I'm sure we can send you all the documentation. This is something that we will work on next week to include within our Blues article in our help center. Yeah, people know how to do these just really easily from Ubidots, and it's possible.

Speaker: Rob Lauer

Cool. Another good question, a common question I probably should have mentioned in my slides is, “What about the power consumption of the Notecard, the Blues Wireless Notecard?” We have, if you look in our developer documentation at dev.blues.io, we have full data sheets for the Notecards that talk about power consumption. When they're idling, they can consume as little as eight microamps. Of course, depending on whether or not it's connecting to cellular sending Notes, it'll fluctuate beyond that, but we really have designed it as a low power device from day one. Let's see…

Here’s a question about navigating through different devices in the same dashboard.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Yeah. That's something we didn't show because of the time. If you allow me just two minutes, I will go through something called dynamic dashboard. Is that okay?

Speaker: Rob Lauer

Yeah. While you're doing that, I'm gonna answer one quick question. Somebody's asking about sending a recording of the webinar. Yeah, we'll send out a link to the YouTube recording in about a day.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Awesome. So the person that—am I sharing my screen? Just give me one second, I want to make sure yeah, okay, this is working. The dashboard we showed you today is a static dashboard, which is always fixed to a variable or always fixed to a set of variables or a device, right? But there is a type of dashboard called dynamic dashboard. If you select this option, Dynamic Dashboard, you will see how this works. I'm just doing this really quickly. Default device, I'm going to select this one, which is the Earth Day project. What you're going to see right now is another option. Here, you have a device drop down, so you will build all of your widgets off the dynamic tab. Once you select the device you want to see data from, you simply select it here, and then the widgets and the whole dashboard will automatically populate with that device data. You don't need to create a device per dashboard, a static dashboard per device to see the data of your devices. You simply create a dynamic one; they all should have the same structure, I mean, the variables and once you select it, it will change automatically to that device. I hope that answers the question. If you have any more or need any further clarification as to this, we are up in our support channel found at support.Ubidots.com [Editor’s note: The support site is help.ubidots.com]. Okay, do you have more questions?

Speaker: Rob Lauer

Yeah, there are a few more here. I'd like to bring on, so we have, Brandon Satrom has been lurking on the line here. He is my supervisor and Director of Developer Experience at Blues Wireless. There's a question for you, Brandon, that I think you can speak more intelligently to. Could you talk more about using the Notecard for pushing—or Notehub—it should be using Notehub, for pushing OTA firmware updates to the microcontroller?

Speaker: Brandon Satrom - Vice President Developer Experience - Blues Wireless 41:38

Great question. Can you hear me okay? Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining today. That's a fantastic question. We provide in Notehub the ability to update two types of firmware: One is the actual firmware that's running on the STM32 microcontroller on the Notecard, but we also do provide the ability to do OTA firmware updates of your host MCU firmware. Now the important thing to understand here is because we allow you to bring your own MCU or your own single-board computer, there's not really a generic way in which to do that that covers every single board, but we do provide a set of APIs that are documented in our dev site that give you the ability to do that device firmware update, or DFU, using the Notecard. The way that the process works is that you upload a piece of firmware into Notehub, and then Notehub will notify the Notecard that the firmware is ready to go. Then you call a set of DFU APIs on the Notecard to actually get that firmware binary, and then it's up to you on the host side to update it in place. We have examples today for doing that, in both the STM32 family of microcontrollers and an ESP32. They both follow different approaches, so the samples are a little bit different, but we can provide a link and the docs of where you can do that with ESP32 today. If you have any other questions, or if you're working with an MCU that's not either of those, you can feel free to reach out to us over email and we can provide a bit more guidance. Great questions.

Speaker: Rob Lauer

Well thank you. Just a couple more questions here. Someone's asking how long it took to put together the dashboard we saw on the Ubidots site. I don't think, so Zach Fields is the guy on our team that put together the dashboard. I can't speak to literally how long it took for him, but I can guarantee you it wasn't very long. I mean, my experience with Ubidots is like, click, click around and you've got some really awesome looking widgets, but there's a lot of customizations you can do. I'm willing to bet that he did not spend more than about an hour putting together that dashboard. You all can speak to that more intelligently probably.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Yeah, actually. I’m going to be honest here. We built it yesterday, as we actually test ourselves and how we know the platform. We actually like to use those exercises. Yeah, it took us like 45 minutes. We selected the colors we wanted to show, and from that point forward, it was just clicking, clicking, copy, pasting, and that's it. Once you get the idea about how building a dashboard works, it is really straightforward. Yeah, and fun. Yeah.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

One more question here before we stop: “Can either Ubidots or Notehub send an alert via SMS or email if a threshold is exceeded?” That's another great question. I can speak to the Blues Wireless side. We provide, we actually have a tutorial for this, for using Twilio MMS to send text messages. I've done that myself, and it works really well. So the answer from Notehub is yes. I don't know about Ubidots.

Speaker: David Sepulveda

Yes. The answer from Ubidots is also yes. You can find that here in our module called data and then events, and I'm just going to take a minute and basically, what I'm going to show you right now is the different types of events that you can create within Ubidots. We are going to select a random variable, say dissolved oxygen raw. Here, if it's equal to 10, then the alert will be triggered. Then in the Action section, you will be able to create these ones: send email, send SMS, telegram, voice call, set a variable within Ubidots, send a message to a certain Slack channel, trigger a webhook. This is actually the way we are going to work with the Notehub API to trigger data from Ubidots to the Notecard. Then there are options here, right? It is really simple to fill out. If you are sending an email, you just enter here the addresses separated by a comma, and you're able to set the subject and the message and actually access some variables that we call bookmarks that relate to the value variable and device that triggered the event. That's fully customizable, and you can also have something called “back to normal” action. Once the condition you set on the “if” trigger section goes back to normal, then you get an alert. That's optional and you also can share that with a subject and a message. Right. Really simple, and it's available, you'll find the help center article in our help center.

Speaker: Cristina Botero 

As a matter of fact, it can also be white label as well as your emails. If you're actually offering this as your own IoT platform, just so you know, you can actually send it with your brand as well as the emails. We have a bunch of events such as Zapier Integration, with more than 2,000 apps to connect your Ubidots ecosystem. You will be connecting Blues Wireless, Ubidots, and all your deployment to an infinite amount of possibilities out there. That was a great question. Thank you.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

Well, I think that's it for the questions. I apologize if I missed any, because the questions window we're working with in GoToWebinar is pretty tiny, and there’s a lot of scrolling involved. I did paste a link to my email address, if anybody has any follow-up questions about anything with Blues Wireless, the Notecard, or Notehub. I think they’ve already, you’ve been provided with support resources on the Ubidots side as well.

Speaker: David Sepulveda 

Yeah, from our end, just enjoy this time. We would like you to feel free to reach out whenever you want. You can find our emails in the last slide: [email protected] and Cristina the same ([email protected]). If you need support, it would be great if you can reach out to [email protected].

Speaker: Cristina Botero 

We do all these integrations and partnerships thinking about you, so we love feedback, questions, projects, anything. We'll be happy to walk you through, showcase them, and put them on our social media as well. We'd be more than excited and happy to receive any feedback from any of you out there. Thank you so much, Rob. It was very exciting.

Speaker: Rob Lauer 

All right. Bye, everyone.

Speaker: Cristina Botero

Bye, bye. Bye everyone.