Global Asset Tracking with a Cellular Notecard and Datacake - On Demand Webinar
As the IoT has matured to become an industry of its own, asset tracking has emerged as one of the most useful and pragmatic use cases. Whether it's a simple GPS tracking device or as complex as monitoring global supply chains, implementing an accurate, low-power system is critical.
In this webinar we go through the details for building your own asset tracker with cellular network connectivity and a dashboard. We covered project components including hardware, data routing, and data visualization.
Webinar Transcript - Global Asset Tracking with a Cellular Notecard and Datacake
Speaker: Rob Lauer - Director of Developer Relations - Blues Wireless 00:00
Well, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone. Welcome to our webinar today co-presented by Blues Wireless and Datacake, as you can tell by the title. Today, we're diving into creating IoT asset tracking applications. We'll be creating these solutions with hardware and services provided by Blues Wireless, and the low code platform provided by Datacake. Effectively, what we're going to be doing today is taking data acquired by our Blues Wireless hardware configured as standalone asset trackers, which yes, that data can look something like this giant mess of JSON. We're going to take that data, and we're going to make it look far more gorgeous, and more importantly, more usable with Datacake. Datacake lets you add engaging visuals from graphs and charts to scales and maps, all kinds of great reports, all with writing very little code to no code at all. Now some quick logistics before we really start today: If you run into any problems with audio dropping out or video stuttering or random network issues, rest assured, there will be a recording of the webinar available on YouTube in the coming days. You'll find it on the Blues Wireless YouTube channel at bit.ly/Blues-youtube. You'll also receive a link in a follow up email. While you're there, I'll shamelessly suggest subscribing to our channel on YouTube.
Now as a quick introduction to our speakers, first up today will be the guy you see in the corner. That's me, my name is Rob Lauer, and I'm Developer Relations Lead here at Blues Wireless. Many of you I've interacted with on the Blues Wireless Developer Forum already, so hello to all of you. If you find yourself on Twitter these days, you can find me there, ask questions @RobLauer. I'll be covering the Blues Wireless hardware asset tracking solutions today, and then I'll be handing things off to Simon Kemper. Far more importantly, Simon Kemper is founder and CEO of Datacake, and he's going to show off the Datacake platform and make some sense of all the asset tracking data we send his way. Also, be sure to follow Datacake on Twitter, not to completely ram social accounts down your throat or anything. But you can of course, find both Blues Wireless and Datacake on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We know everyone consumes their social in their own ways, so rest assured we are on the platform you are using, so give a follow if you're interested.
Now, if you're new to the Blues Wireless ecosystem of hardware and services, first off, welcome. We're very glad you're here. At Blues, our mission is to make cellular IoT easy for developers and affordable for all.
Our focus is on securing your data from the moment it's acquired by a sensor all the way through to landing on your cloud application of choice. All of our hardware solutions are low power out of the box to the tune of eight micro amps when idle. We're also very much a developer-focused company. Most of us at Blues here are current or former engineers, so we know the pains you all experience, and we are building solutions to ease your IoT connectivity burdens. Now to help visualize where Blues Wireless fits in your IoT solution, let's start with your sensors. You're acquiring data of all types from location, temperature, humidity, motion, gases, and so on. This data is likely processed by a microcontroller or single-board computer, but you need to get that data to your cloud, so you'd then be using the Blues Wireless Notecard to securely deliver data over cellular to our cloud service Notehub. Notehub then lets you route data to your cloud of choice, which today is Datacake.
Notehub takes a lot of the pain out of securely transferring data and conforming to whatever data structures your remote endpoint is anticipating. Now, zooming in on our hardware, the Notecard is the core of what we provide. It's a low power cellular and GPS module, measuring a tiny 30 millimeters by 34 millimeters. It does add an M.2 edge connector for embedding in your project. The API, the way you interact with a Notecard, is all JSON. Gone are the days of archaic AT commands to manage your cellular modem. We also have SDKs for Python, Go, Arduino, and C. There are Notecard varieties that work globally using NB-IoT, LTE-M, and Cat-1 cellular standards. However, to make it easier to use your Notecard when you're prototyping or when you're ready to embed in a permanent solution, we provide Notecarriers.
These are development boards that allow you to snap in a Notecard and connect it to virtually any solution you can dream up. The Notecarrier AF for example, includes a Feather-compatible socket. The A model includes headers that let you hook it up to any microcontroller you want. The B is a small form factor Notecarrier, and the Notecarrier Pi is a Pi HAT for working with any Raspberry Pi-compatible single-board computer. Again, Notehub is the Blues Wireless cloud service that receives data from the Notecard and in turn routes it to your cloud application of choice. Within Notehub, you can also manage fleets of devices, and you can update both host microcontroller and Notecard firmware over the air. Pretty cool. Again, Notehub is all about securely transmitting data from both the Notecard and to your cloud. I want to bring up this image one more time, just to drive home where Blues Wireless fits, truly making it easier to deliver data over cellular to your cloud.
Speaker: Rob Lauer 05:55
While you can imagine a myriad of uses of cellular IoT, today we are narrowing in on asset tracking. It's a very common scenario where we're tracking not only the location, but other physical environment variables and actively reporting that data in near real time to the cloud so we can then view the status anytime, anywhere. If you're at all familiar with the asset tracking capabilities of the Notecard, you're probably then familiar with the card.location.track API. This is a great example of the JSON-based API we provide. Now I’ll show you how to fully configure a standalone asset tracker, but really, the simplicity of this API is pretty fantastic. In this example, I'm calling card.location.track. I'm telling it to start tracking now and telling it to save tracking data in a Note file on the Notecard called locations.qo. Notecard is going to store sensor and location data in this file and sync it up with Notehub over cellular on a cadence you specify.
While you can absolutely use an asset tracker with an attached microcontroller or single-board computer, the beauty of what I'm going to show you today is that you don't need to. Everything you need is in this picture: a Notecard with a Notecarrier A. Now with a LiPo battery attached, what you see here becomes a production-ready asset tracker that can last for days, weeks, months depending on the size of the battery and your power configurations. Pretty cool. However, some of you with a keen eye may have noticed I dropped a little hint in our invites to this webinar. We actually have a new product coming out soon that I'm super happy to showcase today. Soon you'll be able to buy an external GPS mobile tracker HAT that fits directly on top of the Notecarrier A, the same Notecarrier I showed in the previous image. You can see front and center here this HAT uses a Quectel L86 GNSS module, which has amazing performance in both acquisition and tracking of GPS satellites. It can also calculate and predict orbits automatically using up to three days of cumulative data, so it can fix position quickly and with low power consumption, even when signal levels are lower. Power consumption when tracking is low at 26 micro amps. Now, a good question is why would you want to use a tracker HAT along with an existing Notecarrier A? Well, I would say if you want to use cellular data and GPS concurrently. If you think about it, with a standard Notecarrier A tracker setup, your cellular module has to switch back and forth between cellular to send data and GPS to track location. Now while this works fine for many implementations, there are certainly times when these lag times of restarting and finding new cell towers or GPS satellites takes too long. Maybe you miss out on a couple of minutes of location data as the system switches functions. It's not an issue any longer with this external GPS HAT. Second is this feature known as hot start. With this tracker HAT, GPS signals will be super quick to lock on, because the Almanack and Ephemeris data is going to be retained between GPS readings. Now with a standard Notecarrier A configuration, some of that data is retained, but not all of it. That's actually called a warm start. Finally, of course, as I showed you, the convenience of adding this to an existing Notecarrier A tracker can't really be matched. It fits right on top. All right, enough of me kind of talking at you. What I’d like to do now is show off how to configure a Notecard plus Notecarrier A as a standalone tracker. I will also show how to do the exact same with this new mobile tracker HAT.
Speaker: Rob Lauer 09:47
Give me a moment here as I switch over to my development environment. Okay, so I want to start the demo in Notehub.io. Now Notehub is set up like many other cloud applications you’re already familiar with. Everything’s set up on a project basis, so one project can have virtually unlimited individual Notecard devices associated with it. If I want to peek into a project really quickly here—this isn’t meant as a really comprehensive Notehub demonstration, but just enough to pique your interest—we can see recent devices that were connected to this project. Again, we can update Notecard and microcontroller firmware over the cloud, and we can view individual data usage for individual devices. We can organize devices into fleets, so whatever sort of fleet organization you might want to use, you can accomplish that with Notehub. We can look at individual events. This is the data sent over cellular by our Notecards, and we’ll drill into this in a bit. The all-important routes, I don’t have any routes defined in this project, but this is how we're going to actually route data from Notehub to Datacake, and there's a variety of settings. One I'll point out here is the member settings.
This allows for role-based provisioning of various pieces of Notehub projects to other individuals in your organization, obviously very useful when you start scaling up a project. That is my 60-second overview of Notehub. What I'm going to do now is switch over to the Blues Wireless developer portal.
Speaker: Rob Lauer 11:31
Now my favorite part of dev.Blues.io is our integrated terminal. I apologize for the small window size—trying to conform to the webinar standards here, so everything's going to be a little bit compressed. But what I can do here is hook up a Notecard and Notecarrier with a USB cable and connect it to my browser using the browser's web serial API. This works in any chromium-based browser like Chrome, Edge or Brave. Right now, I have a Notecard and Notecarrier A connected to my computer. If I want to configure this as a standalone asset tracker, I'm going to issue a few different commands. Excuse me as I copy and paste here so I don't make any mistakes. A common first command I like to do personally is the card.restore command. You'll see I lost connection because I'm restoring a card to scratch. This is helpful with demos just make sure I haven't, I'm not already using this card in, there is no card in some other projects. I'm going to repair my device. Now I'm starting a new card from scratch. Now for real now, I am going to issue the hub.set command. What this is going to do is this is going to associate this Notecard with this product UID—this is a unique identifier that's going to link my Notecard to a project in Notehub. I'm going to say, I'm going to tell it to connect over cellular on a periodic basis, and that periodic basis is going to be every 60 minutes outbound—outbound is relative to the Notecard—so if there's data to send, send it every hour.
Inbound, again, this is inbound relative to the Notecard, check for any incoming messages from Notehub every 720 minutes. Let me issue that command. You'll see an empty JSON object is sent. That's the confirmation that everything has worked correctly. At this point, with my Notecard attached to my project on Notehub, I can issue the card.location.mode command. This is going to say, again, connect periodically, so this is the GPS command, or enabling GPS, so connect to GPS periodically. We're going to sample GPS location every 3600 seconds; obviously, you can change that to whatever works for your project. This is only going to activate GPS when motion is detected on the device. Finally, to start tracking—this is just so ridiculously simple—I'm going to call the card.location.track API, and I'm going to issue the start parameter, which means start immediately, the heartbeat parameter, which means even if there's no movement at all, still send a heartbeat every X number of hours. I'm going to say, issue this every 12 hours.
I could throw this device in a box and ship it around the world as is. Now to just prove a point here, let me head back to Notehub. I am in the demo project now, so we see that a device connected about a minute ago, which is great. That's the device I just used, and we can look at any events that came through with this device. Again, I apologize for the small screen here, but we can look at some environment variables that were sent over. Some session information, let's just drill into one of these quickly here. If I drill into an individual event, we can see some metadata about that event: the location of the tower that it connected to, the body of the JSON here, and the full JSON payload as well, which is super useful for debugging and seeing what's going on with your Notecard. Let's do the same exact thing now but make some slight changes for my mobile tracker HAT.
What I'm going to do is disconnect my Notecarrier A and reconnect a different Notecarrier A with my tracker HAT. Let's reconnect. Looks good. Again, because I don't want to make a mistake, I'm just going to issue a card.restore. Okay, I can reconnect with that restore done. Again, I'm going to issue the same hub.set request, except for this time, you'll notice I'm keeping cellular in continuous mode, but I am going to link it to the same project in Notehub, so that's all good. Here's a new command. This is the card.aux command. This tells the device to look for an external GPS HAT, and I can enable GPS with the card.location.mode command. This time, I'm going to put this in continuous mode so I'll have cellular and GPS both running in continuous mode. Finally, I'm going to issue that same card.location.track command. This time I'm adding a sync true parameter.
This is a handy one, because it tells the Notecard that anytime we're adding data to a Note file, anytime we're accumulating data on the Notecard, like sampling, sensor data, or location, immediately sync that to Notehub. Don't wait for that periodic sync, that periodic outgoing sync. We're all good. Again, my new mobile tracker HAT is now fully configured, so let's make sure this worked correctly by heading back up to, sure enough, there is my new device. This is the mobile tracker HAT. We can look in our events tab here. Sure enough, here is some initial data being sent by my mobile tracker HAT. Now this is all fine and good. I'm kind of just telling you to assume that this is all working fine. However, last weekend, what I did was I took this same mobile tracker HAT, and I dropped it in my car for the weekend. Little did my family know, in this tracker project, I was actually tracking our locations in the car throughout the entire weekend.
If I navigate to my events tab, we can see this long list of events that were tracked over the weekend. If you have a keen eye, you may notice this track.qo file. This is the default name of a Note file that’s saved in an asset tracking scenario. If I want to look at one of these specific events, I can again see all the metadata associated with this event. What’s most interesting is in the full JSON object here, and we can see information about when this was tracked, the temperature on the card. That was 23 degrees Celsius at the time, must have the air conditioner running, the GPS coordinates of where this location was tracked, as well as the tower coordinates. This is the tower, the cell tower. Now I bet I can find another event with a…. Well, here's one I can see already. This just proves I had this in an overly hot car. Sure enough, I got up to 47 degrees Celsius, so a bit warm last weekend.
Speaker: Rob Lauer 19:22
Now it's one thing to kind of browse through and look at all this data one event at a time but it's another to pipe this over to a cloud platform that's going to allow me to visualize this data. I mentioned this briefly before, but if we head over to our routes tab, this is where we actually configure Notehub to automatically sync this data securely with another cloud platform. Now, I don't want to steal too much of Simon's thunder here, but this is the UI that I'm going to use in Notehub to actually start migrating my data over to say to AWS, or Azure or Google Cloud, or I mean, there's really limitless possibilities here especially with our general HTTP/HTTPS request response. This is effectively saying any remote endpoint with a RESTful API, we can send data to securely.
With that, I'm going to jump back to my slides quick and then send it over to Simon to show off the really cool stuff. All right, well, I hope that helped to cement how easy it is to get up and running with asset tracking. Just to quickly recap, it's literally only three API calls to set up a new tracker from scratch. In fact, you can add all of these commands to a single JSON file to make it easier to set up and deploy numerous devices. Again, when configuring the new tracker HAT, the commands are very similar. Instead of using periodic mode for cellular, you can leave it in continuous mode. Note that periodic mode will always save some battery of course. There's also a call to card.aux that tells the Notecard to use this external GPS. Again, GPS can also remain in a continuously connected state. Then there's the optional sync true parameter on card.location.track that tells the Notecard to perform an immediate sync to Notehub when Notes are added. Finally, like I showed you moments ago, we end up with all this interesting and valuable data in Notehub, but Notehub is not meant to be the endpoint of your data. This is where Datacake comes in. I'd like to hand the controls over to Simon now and let him show off how Datacake can help make sense of everything we have gathered so far.
Speaker: Simon Kemper - Co-founder and CEO of Datacake 21:32
Hello, and welcome to the webinar with Blues Wireless. Today, we are going to show you how you can connect your Notecards and asset tracking mode or in any other mode to Datacake directly. First of all, before we start, I would like to give you a short introduction into what Datacake is. Datacake is an IoT platform, which allows you to connect various devices from cellular devices using MQTT or webhooks. Today, we will be using the webhook integration to integrate the Blues Wireless Notecard using the Notehub to Datacake directly. We have different resources available, like our YouTube channel where you can see everything that is possible with Datacake and introductions and so on. You can also browse our website to see what we're actually doing. We’ve also got a large documentation page where everything is covered. I would like to continue now and start. For this webinar, I have already placed my Notecard here on the table, which is already queued up on the Notehub.
Let's start and get this onto Datacake. Datacake is a web-based cloud-hosted IoT platform. It brings everything like dashboard builder, database and payload decoders, and so on. What do you need to do is sign up on Datacake; signing up with Datacake is free, and we always support up to two free devices. That means you can try it out without entering a credit card and stuff like that. It's as simple as registering on any other IoT platform or platform in general. After you've logged in—I created a separate account for this—this brings you into your first workspace. Workspaces on Datacake are things that hold devices but also members. You can invite members by entering an email address and then automatically—by the way, switch to English—and then select the permissions that you want this member to have and permissions for devices, also, for API users, to query data directly from our REST API. But let's go back to the devices. In this tutorial, I would now like to show you how you bring your Notehub.
First of all, let's go to the Notehub. This is the Notecard that's connected here. I've just set it up using the example here in the documentation from Blues Wireless using this asset tracking here. It's connected and the data is already received on the Notehub, and we're now going to continue to bring them into Datacake. Back to Datacake. This is your first workspace. There are no devices in it, and everything starts by clicking on this button here at the top right, which brings up our device and device model, so now we select API. You see the various types here that we support—we are interested in API integration. Then we need to choose a product. Basically, your product is something—every device on Datacake belongs to a product—a product is the definition of how a device behaves. To make it super easy and fast, we've got a template section for various devices.
Now we've got to select a new product from template. In here, you'll find a Blues Wireless Notecard tracking template, we select that, we press on next. Now it is asking us for a serial number and for name. We could auto generate serial number or use a Notecard user-defined serial number, but in this case, we're going back to the Notehub and we're going to copy the device UID because data coming from the Notehub will be matched based on device UID. Because of that, we're using this as a serial number. You can, of course, if you have custom serial numbers set on the Notecard, you could use that as well. But we're using the device UID. We call that My Notecard Asset Tracker. We press on next, and we choose the free device. As I've said, we support up to two free devices for everyone. We press on Add Device, and this device is now added to your workspace on Datacake. We can already open this device up here; you can see it here in the table.
Also, we could select some additional things here to show the serial number as well as the product and so on, and we can see that it's never connected. But we can open this up already. This brings us to what’s included in the template. By using a template, we create a dashboard for you. It’s the starting dashboard, which shows all the basic information that is coming from the Notecard asset tracker example. When you go into the configuration and you scroll down a little bit, you can see that there's all different kinds of stuff like the HTTP decoder and also the fields for the database. You can add new fields here, or you can modify them, but we will stick with the starting template. If we scroll a little bit up, you can see this is the HTTP payload decoder. In here, you find the HTTP endpoint URL. Right now, the Notehub is already present. The Notecard is on the Notehub, and it's receiving data, and the device is created on Datacake, but right now there is no connection between the Notehub and Datacake, and this is what we're going to do now.
For this, we are creating a new route on Datacake. There's an old one I deleted first. Yeah, then we go back to Datacake and into the configuration of the device. Once more, if you are on your device, you go into configuration and scroll down a little bit until you reach the HTTP payload decoder section. Then you find the endpoint URL; this URL is for that product. Every single device that you add to that product receives data through the endpoint URL. We are now going to copy this back into the route section and we're adding a new route. We simply named this Datacake Route and paste the route URL, the web URL that we just copied, we press on save and that's it. Now let's go back to the devices in here and we could see when it's last connected. We're also going to Datacake. Now we go back to the dashboard, and I have this Notecard here and I will connect it.
In a couple of seconds, it should be connected to the Notehub and send data to the Notehub. This will be forwarded using the route directly onto Datacake. Yes, there it is, the first few information have already arrived. I am right now sitting in the basement of a building in my home office, and there is cellular reception, cellular signal. What we don't have yet is GPS, but we are getting the cell tower location. Using this template on Datacake, you can also display the cell tower location, so it takes just a few seconds and then we will also see the cell tower. There it is, the cell tower location. If we would be now outside, and if the Notecard would have good GPS signal, we could see and also track the historical information. I will be showing this because it's a pre-recorded thing in a couple of minutes, so just to show you or just a quick summary of what happened.
We went into the devices, and you can see it’s online right now. We added a new device using the API integration and the Blues Wireless template. You enter the serial number based on the device UID from the Notehub, and we created a route from Datacake, from the Notehub to Datacake. This is all we need to do to receive data using a template. The coolest thing about the templates is that it brings you the dashboard, the payload decoders, and of course the Database section. You can now modify everything. In the next phase of this webinar, I would like to show you what possibilities Datacake has in terms of creating applications and white label things and alerting, and so on. With the second phase of our webinar, this is about the capabilities of Datacake. We created just the device from the template and connected the Notehub and the Notecard to Datacake. This is what you get—your first dashboard. But still, you're able to modify everything, starting with the dashboard.
We've got this dashboard editor, and you can access the editing mode by clicking on that switch button here on the right side. This will open up the drag and drop. What you see is what you get dashboard editor that allows you to modify the existing dashboard, also to modify the appearance and the settings of each of these widgets here. Also, you can add new widgets, duplicate that, or copy the dashboards. Also, we got a mobile view, so it’s two layouts for desktop and mobile, and mobile is when you open up the platform on a mobile browser. This is completely mobile optimized. You get this separate layout here, which you can override the mobile layout and the desktop layout. This is what dashboard brings you. Let's go back into the configuration. As you can see here, when I scroll down, I mentioned it before, it's the payload decoder.
This extracts the information coming from the JSON on the Notehub. If you include some additional sensor data for your project, it's as simple as editing this payload decoder here. As you can see here, we are accessing the different files in here, and then we are forwarding this to the device on Datacake. This means that you can use this also as a starting template. We've got extensive documentation how you can write these payload decoders, and you can modify them. Modifications that you do here to the payload decoder, to the database, and to the dashboard, they are saved into the product, which that device belongs to. We can also see this here in the devices. You can see here, okay, this is the product that has just been created, just created, and my device. The next time that you add another Notecard, instead of creating this from the template and selecting the Blues Wireless Notecard tracking template here once more, you can choose the existing product, which is already here in your workspace. Then you simply can add multiple devices to it, and they all look like the modifications that you’ve done to the first device. This is batch creating devices and then doing modifications and having these modifications for all devices. But let’s go back to the Datacake platform itself. Now we’ve got this device, what else can we do on here? We’ve got also a rule section, which allows you to create super simple “if this then that” style rules, where we select this device and also a temperature field, like the car temperature. We simply want to check if this is larger than, for example, 35 degrees, then—so this is the “if this then that style”—please send an email or send an SMS or call a webhook. You could then send data back and send downlinks. Downlinks is something that works with LoRaWAN, MQTT, and we will also introduce this for webhooks for the Notecard.
Let's go back to the email. You can add multiple receivers here, and the subject could be something more useful than I'm typing here, and you have some kind of placeholder language for ways that you want to show. Also, let's call this Test Rule. We create that rule and you can see it here. You can post that rule and create multiple rules. You can also chain different rules like multiple conditions with an “and,” and this is the basic rule engine that allows you to send alerts to your email members, cell phone numbers, whatever. Also, there is pretty interesting functionality, which is called a reports engine. Just a quick run through this, which allows you to—let's call it Test Report—gather reports that are run periodically like this one every day at 12:00. It includes all devices and please include the voltage and the RSSI, for example. It will be created as individual files, and you could also send this to individual email receivers. Press on save for the settings here once more. For example, run this report now. Go into the report and you can see here okay, this is My Notecard Asset Tracker, which is now being sent also as a CSV file to email to all of your report receivers in here.
This was very quick, because I would like to show you something now that most of you are mainly interested in. It's highly popular feature on Datacake, which is our white labelling. So up until now, everything was happening on app.datacake.de, but if you want to present your solutions built on the Blues Wireless Notecard to your customers using your own domain, the White Label package allows you to hook up your own company domain to the Datacake platform and the Datacake referencing will be removed everywhere, and you can upload your own logo. The White Label package costs 49 Euros per month, but it's unlimited tenants and unlimited users because of the tenants—more on thar later—but I would like to show you how easy it is to set this up.
We press on Get Started to work through this setup dialogue here. We need a name. We’ll call that Asset Tracker Club, and the domain is assettracker.club. Also the email, which is for signup, user registration, password reset, notifications, alerts, and of course the reports—this email is maybe like [email protected]b, for support email team number two, whatever, it makes no sense but it's just for the showcase here. We press on Next. Yes, I want to buy this White Label site for 48.31 Euros, because they do add the tax in here. This White Label site has been purchased. Everything is set up, and we can now go and yeah, do some settings here. First of all, we upload a custom logo. I've got this here—I created an asset tracking club logo. We open this, save this. As you can see here right now, this will not be changed because it's still under Datacake. We can also upload our own Terms of Service. Yes, we want users to be able to sign up. Now let's go back into the DNS. I've created this domain before. Lucas, our co-founder, has created this. Thanks, Lucas for doing this work here. Then he has pointed the DNS service to that IP address, so we can now validate this here I think. Takes some time. Then we press on email, where we can also see the email templates and the device capabilities and so on.
Yeah, the DNS settings have been confirmed, so everything is great. The email right now does not work because there's no email inbox behind it. Basically, this means that you have to create your own email inbox on your domain. Device types, we can choose what kind of device types are allowed on our white label but also the capabilities. If we want to have different device types, we also need to enable the billing in here. The MQTT server can be taken out and the gateway monitoring and the Cake Red, which is our Node-RED service. But the API for example, we've got a REST API, and an MQTT server and the GraphQL API. They are also white label completely, so everything runs on your domain. This means that even if your customers are using the third-party API integrations, they don't see Datacake at all. Back to the domain, back to general, everything is set up correctly. We're now going to copy this domain here and open this up in a new tab—Asset Tracking Club—and we can see it's the Asset Tracking Club web white label page, and we are going to log into this. This will bring us into a new workspace where there is no device, and this is where it looks different right now, because when you press on Add Device, you only see the pin code option. This is something that I would like to show you right now, because this is a feature often used by many of our customers preparing devices in their manufacturing line or in their factory and then shipping them out to their customers. They're printed on a sticker with a barcode or with the serial number and the PIN code. This is also something—I'm in a different workspace here, so this is my own workspace—we could also create a new workspace for customer workspace just to show you how this works. This is the tenancy feature. We are creating this workspace—everybody has this feature and it's unlimited—you can create as many tenants and workspaces as you would like. We are in the customer workspace here. Imagine now, you ship devices to your customers, Notecard devices, and then you want your customers to directly use it. You set everything up on your master workspace on the Datacake site here, and then then we go into the devices here, and we open up this device. I show you how you can use the claiming to bring these devices to your customer. Let's go into the configuration. We simply now copy the serial number, and there is this claiming option. We simply put in a very easy claiming code so I can remember it and copy the serial number once more. Then we go into the Asset Tracker Club White Label site.
Now let's assume that I would be the customer registering on the Asset Tracker Club White Label website, because it was in the documentation, and then I press on Add Device, and now I paste the serial number. Then I just put in the PIN code and press on Add Device to Workspace. Now this device, with the dashboard that you set up, is added to the customer workspace, and he [the customer] can, he has access to it and can do everything that you want him to do. He can directly use the device and has all the features like the rule engine, then also the reports, and he can invite members as well to it. Also, even if this is the Asset Tracking Club White Label site, your automated end customer is still on the white label site able to modify the logo on this workspace. That means he can upload his own workspace logo, but it still remains on the Asset Tracker Club White Label site. This is the white labelling. It's super easy to set up; you still get some individualization options like taking out device types.
Also, you can switch some capabilities on and off and upload your logo, set your own terms of service for the signup, and so on. Last but not least, there's one thing I would like to show you, which is also very important. We've got a feature called global dashboard. The Dashboard Designer that you just saw was device specific, so that means that every device has its own dashboard. You can also create global workspace dashboards; we call that overview. Create this, and this adds dashboard to the sidebar. This is now web-based, or a dashboard that can host widgets for all of your devices. If we put a widget in here, let's do this map widget here. In the device and field, we can select the device and also the device location or the tower location. We can place this here and of course, we have access to all different kinds of widgets in here. We could also put in table widgets, and histogram, the chart, and so on and display the data of multiple devices. Also, I've made this a public dashboard, that means that we can now copy this link here, and if we open this once more up in a new browser—we can paste this link here—it runs on your white label site. You've got a public dashboard, which you can share to everyone; they are not required to sign on. It's a public one, and you can enable the public dashboard feature or disable it, and it has your white label site logo. This is a basic example. Of course, you can create different kinds of widgets on the public dashboard, which allows you to create overviews of your fleet or whatever, all done without any codes, and super easy to do. Yes, so we're at the end of our webinar, or at least at my pre-recording. I hope we've got some time slots for questions and answering them. This showed you how easy it is to bring the Notecard onto Datacake and to use the template to get a dashboard and be ready to start and work with it within a couple of minutes. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out directly to us using one of the contact methods on our webpage or using the live chat, which is also available on the App Datacake, but of course not on the white label site. I would be happy to answer your questions and see you on Datacake. Thanks for watching and stay tuned.
Speaker: Rob Lauer 44:35
Awesome. Thank you so much, Simon, and thanks again for everyone attending. Stick around here—we're going to answer some of your questions next. Make sure you check out dev.blues.io for a set of developer resources around the Notecard and Notehub, and you can use bit.ly/blues-datacake to take 15% off your purchase on the Blues Wireless store. Likewise use code “BLUESWIRELESSDATACAKE2021” when subscribing to Datacake and you can take advantage of some higher device limits and discounts on the Datacake platform. Last but not least, be sure to check out the extensive Datacake developer resources at docs.datacake.de.
Recommended Videos
Monitoring Legacy Analog Systems with TinyML, Edge Impulse, and Blues Wireless
Using Machine Learning and modern IoT, we can modernize by tracking and reporting on existing systems in previously unheard of ways.
Rapidly Prototyping Environmental Monitoring IoT Devices
We dive into challenges and solutions for adding wireless connectivity. Between cellular, LoRaWAN, and Wi-Fi there are a myriad options and potential pitfalls. Walk away with real advice for building your next IoT device thanks to the experiences of Clean Earth Rovers and LimnoTech!
Global Asset Tracking with a Cellular Notecard and Datacake
Asset tracking is a common, useful, and pragmatic IoT use cases. Whether simple journey tracking or complex monitoring of global medical supply shipments, it is key to implement an accurate, low-power asset tracking system.
Getting Started with Blues Wireless and the Notecard
Join us to learn the basics of Blues Wireless and the Notecard!
Lightning Fast – From IoT Concept to Pilot With Additive Manufacturing
In this webinar, we discuss innovative ideas that reduce time and risk in hardware product development. We’ll explain how you can get your IoT product to pilot phase much faster and cheaper than your competitors.
From Device to Cloud Dashboard with Cellular IoT
You can build an IoT device with advanced features and capabilities in less than a day with Blues Wireless and Ubidots.