Tech Log #004: Shadow device json vs vanilla MQTT
Carrying on from the previous tech log. The example we are using also uses a Lamda function to send a log note. In the future, Lambda functions can be used as “glue” to pretty much anything. Something to explore in the future when there’s more time available are SNS rules. This would let us send an email when a value is at a certain threshold. Here is a cool example of this.
We accomplished a lot of things working:
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- Look at the data! It’s there
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- Another look at the data
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- Just playing around. Doing this doesn’t work
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- The delta updates are useful, to not get the entire json each time
We played with figuring out what Shadow can do and not do. We looked at the pro’s and con’s of both:
We will be going the Shadow route, because it gives is the capability to use Lambda functions, and the persistence store of the data can be useful in the future. So this tech log #004 and #005 are blurred a little bit because a late night was spent tinkering around with this. With sleep deprivation hitting full swing we hope some of this is coherent.
Some of the time this work session was spent finding the documentation. We were trying to find more information about Shadow updates vs vanilla MQTT. All of the AWS IoT SDKs can be found here. If you’re reading “SDK” for the first time, it means software development kit. They usually consist of libraries, example code, and helper functions – so that you can get going on whatever you need to build with that particular service quickly.
Eventually it will be interesting to try this and see if the certificate conversion with pycert will work properly. The link to the example code in that tutorial doesn’t work, but it can be found here. Something else that we found, there’s a cool demo of robots communicating with each other to accomplish a task in this video: