#dweetpro

Part 3 of 3:

In Part 1 we showed you How to Connect your RaspberryPi to the dweetPro™ messaging system. In Part 2 we discuss how to Control your RPi with dweetPro.

In this tutorial, we show you how to connect your device and control it from a freeboard™ dashboard.  We are using the same RaspberryPi device from before. 

To get started, follow the previous tutorials to connect the RPi device to dweetPro, and write the python software to listen to dweetPro for a trigger. With that complete, we can set up our trigger anywhere, like on our freeboard dashboard.

First, we add a new button widget to the dashboard we previously built. Creating a button is easy with the HTML widget:

We use JavaScript to create the look of the button, made simple with a hosted .PNG file. Depending on the size of the picture, we may need to adjust margins and sizes. 

We shifted our picture to the right with margin-left, and reduced the picture size to fit our window, as seen below (which should all be one line in the .JS editor).

Next, we connect the new button to our dweetPro trigger with a custom freeboard plugin. Learn more about freeboard plugins here. 

Plugins are the best way to customize your freeboard dashboard. You can create any type of widget or datasource you like, and with some skill and JavaScript knowledge, the possibilities are unlimited!  

This tutorial covers only the most basic integration. For more complex integrations, see our other examples in our Twitter feed.

For this plugin, we first support CORS. This is good practice for any new datasource that does not have CORS supported by default. Next, we setup our button, so when it is clicked, we kick off the sendSpin function:

Next, we set up the dweetPro call as a variable, so we can more easily refer to it later:

Remember to use your own Thing ID and Key, but feel free to re-use the same content, or add your own key:value pairs as desired.

Now we create our sendSpin function:

For this example we used the AJAX call to transport our JSON data.  We designate the Type of call (POST), the URL to call, add our Headers (required for dweetPro), content and data types, and the data to send (the variable we setup earlier).

We also added a neat freeboard feature, the Loading Indicator.  This is a feature of freeboard that allows you to show an indicator that something is happening behind the scenes. This helps users understand that the dashboard is working for them, and keeps users from smashing the button over and over again. Read more about the features of freeboard and it’s hidden secrets here.

After creating our plugin, we load the plugin into the Developer Console of our dashboard:

Finally, we refresh the dashboard, and click our button! Watch the video below to see the Plant Spinner in Action!

Next up?  We will show you ways to trigger the Plant Spinner from any UI you want, including SMS, email, calendar events, Alexa, Google Home, Slack, and more.  Let us know which UIs you would like to control your device from, and we will show you how.

Part 2 of 3: 

Previously, we showed you How to connect your RPi to dweetPro™ . 

Now we want to send a message to our RPi, to command our device to do something, like spin a plant for optimal sun exposure. Here is a video of the spinner in action, after receiving the command from dweetPro:

To accomplish this, we modify our RPi code to listen for an event trigger. If we see our event is requested, we take action, then reset our trigger.

Above, you can see the altered code. First we look at the time, then print the last time the device was spun. Next, we look to see if our event has been triggered.

Every 5 seconds we get the latest dweet from dweetPro, and as soon as we see the event has been triggered (1), we spin our device for 3 seconds and Print “toggling spin” to the console.

After the toggle is triggered, we then reset the trigger back to 0. It’s a pretty simple solution for dweetPro, similar to the dweet.io listen API.

The reason we want to use dweetPro over dweet.io is also simple - security!

Unfortunately, security itself is not so simple.  Before our code above, we must declare all the variables we will need in our requests, including our Thing-Name, our Key, and our header( which requires a long token).  

All of our parameters are declared at the top:

Just replace the example keys with your own, found in the dweetPro management UI.  The full example code can be found in this GitHub project.

Finally, to activate our spinner, we use the dweetPro console to POST a dweet to our thing, with the content containing the trigger:

That’s it!  By posting that trigger, we send the command to our RPi to spin. As soon as the RPi checks the latest dweet, it will see the event trigger, spin, then reset the trigger back to 0.

We now have bi-directional messaging!

Next, we will discuss activating that trigger from freeboard with a fancy button, plus new ways to connect, including SMS, Alexa, Slack, and more. Stay Tuned!

I’ve been on a mission: To build a real IoT solution with the dweet™ and freeboard™ platforms. 

First, I created a Thing (Plant Spinner™, it spins your plants for 360° sunlight coverage), then I connected that Thing to the Internet (using dweetPro). Next, I built a dashboard for my thing (using freeboard).  Here is a look at the final solution:

Step 1: Build your Thing

I started with a Raspberry Pi Zero W board (W for wireless), and a robotics kit from CamJam. This kit is meant for kids, which means it was perfect for my non-existent skill set.  The CamJam kit comes with beginner programming instructions, which helped me figure out the motor spin code.

The rest of the hardware includes a plant, a Lazy Susan bearing, a block of wood, a piece of plastic, a couple screws, and a rubber band.

Step 2: Connect your Thing

Once the hardware was all set up, I created the python code to run it. 

Here is the python code.  Feel free to use this code as your guide.

First, import your libraries. For my baseline code I used GPIO and time. For the timestamp, I added datetime. For dweetPro, you need to import requests and json.

Next, I did the RPi GPIO setups, declared my variables, and set up my condition:

The python code spins a motor for 3 seconds, prints the time, then sleeps for 30 seconds. The code then sends the timestamp to dweetPro. In order to do that you must declare the URL, setup the Header, configure the Payload, then run it.

The dweetheader is critically important. There are two different Authorization Tokens that could be used here.  A Thing Token (recommended) does not expire, but only has access to a few APIs. A Session Token can also be used, but it expires, and is not recommended for hard coded things.

Here is some more detail about the various Tokens, and the rest of the Key Concepts in regards to dweetPro

You must also add the ‘content-type’ variable in the header, to inform the system that JSON data will be sent.

The payload_data is also important. Here you declare your Thing-Name (in this case “testie”), you add your Key (Master Key recommended), and you specify the content (Key:value pairs, separated by comma).

Once this is setup, run your code!

If your code runs successfully, you will be able to GET your dweets from the dweetPro console.  Use the dweetPro guide above to see how.

Step 3: Visualize your data

Now that your RPi is successfully connected to the dweetPro platform, you can build a custom dashboard to showcase your solution with freeboard.

The freeboard platform is free to try, free to use if self-hosting, and has many low cost options available.

To connect your dweetPro data to freeboard, begin by adding a new datasource. freeboard has two dweetPro options. For this exercise, I used the dweetPro streaming API (Dweet V2), setup as follows:

Use the same Account Token (Thing Token) used in your python code. Next, I connect the datasource to a widget, like so:

In this case I used the Text widget, however all the standard widgets are available to the dweetV2 datasource.  The historical API (Dweet V2 Storage) is an alternative datasource, and it works with the Historical widget.

Click Save, and voila!  

Here is the example dashboard I created:

https://freeboard.io/board/06fnCt

I have some plans for adding a button to my dashboard that will spin the plant when pressed, along with some hardware upgrades, but for now, this example project is complete.

Hopefully, this guide will help you figure out how to use dweetPro in your next IoT project. If you have any questions, let me know.