The Day(s)
I spent time with the 1NCE OS team in Riga on Thursday and Friday. Similarly to Wednesday, I assembled a network probe with the Raspberry Pi and the modem, but this time also got to explore the software side of the probe, meaning setting up Raspbian, downloading the Sixfab (Company of the modem) software, and connecting to the Raspberry Pi to the mobile network via the 1NCE APN (iot.1nce.net) after inserting the SIM card into the modem. After a few hours of experimenting and dealing with some issues with the 1NCE OS, we (Roberts, Normunds, and me) finally figured everything out, and the device was ready to send and receive UDP messages 🙂
Actually working with AT Commands and sending UDP/CoAP or LwM2M (never heard of that beforehand…) messages that pop up on the 1NCE OS dashboard is super interesting.
Presenting 1NCE OS
Besides 1NCE Connect, 1NCE OS takes the data from 1NCE Connect and transforms them into usable/nicely readable insights and tools. So basically it expands 1NCE’s offer from connectivity only to also include the Firmware and the Cloud. There are lots of different tools (listed in the sidebar), including
Device Authenticator to onboard the device with the help of the SIM Card. So basically it uses the SIM card as a fingerprint (meaning a unique identifier) to sign up loT devices.
loT Integrator to translate data protocols and also bring device data to the Cloud (f.ex. forwarding messages to a webhook or to aws).
Device Inspector for remote monitoring. It keeps hold of the device history for 7 days in a row (f.ex. received UDP messages), mainly used for debugging purposes.
Device Locator to see the device location based on two options – GPS data and Cell Tower data. GPS data might be sent from the device itself, but often isn’t necessary at all, because by evaluating the nearest cell tower, a rough device location can usually be found. There are also features such as geofencing, sending alerts when a specific location is left.
Energy Saver is improving the battery performance of the IoT device by compressing data and therefore optimizing energy consumption and battery life. The cool thing – 1NCE OS reverts the compression and translates it to – usually – “normal” JSON.
