Any Snap4city IoT edge and connected any kind of IoT Devices, provides computing facilities and communicates with cloud platform with secure communication for commands and interaction on Dashboards.
As you probably have seen reading Snap4City documentation and examples, with Snap4City is possible to install IOT Applications in Node-RED on your IOT Edge devices. IOT Edge devices are typically small computer based solutions such as: Raspberry pi, Linux based, Windows based, android with Termux, and also on several servers. The installation of Node-red is easy and can be performed according to the guidelines that you find on:
https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/
For Snap4City, IOT EDGE devices are all devices in which you can install Node-red plus the Snap4City Node-red Library, basic and advanced (which is for developers). The Snap4City library can be installed directly from inside the Node-RED tool by using the so called “manage palette” in the main menu.
You can get information about the libraries from Node-RED library:
https://flows.nodered.org/search?term=snap4city
So that you can have on your IOT Edge Devices all the functionalities that you can find on Snap4City IOT Application on Cloud.
On Snap4City, when you request a number of IOT Applications on Cloud, they are automatically instantiated / deployed on cloud as Docker Container. It is the Snap4City Cluster that manage their allocation on a large scalable infrastructure. On the other hand, you may need to transform data from your local devices to Snap4City devices or data storage or dashboards, so that you may need to have IOT Edge Devices, which can play the role of multiprotocol HUB as in the examples of:
You have a large number of advantages on using the remote access to IOT Edges:
- You can access to the IOT edge from remote by using a secure connection
- You can activate the remote control feature singularly for each IOT Edge Device
- You do not need to be/move in the precise local network to access at the programming of the IOT edge device
- You can update the logic flow of your IOT edge devices from remote, so that you can perform remote maintenance of your network
- you do not need to configure your firewall/gateway in almost all cases, it has been designed for that. So that you do not need to have a fixed IP address, etc. etc.
How to install the feature into your IOT App node-red on your IOT Edge:
- install Snap4City basic library: node-red-contrib-snap4city-user https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-snap4city-user
- from Manage Palette or other means
- Drag and drop block from S4CUtility
- Configure the block with your credentials
- Deploy the Node-red flow
- Go in the list of Your IOT Applications on Snap4City.org portal or other cloud installations of Snap4City tools
- Identify the IOT Edge IOT App and click on it to open the view on the IOT Applications flows, edit, etc. etc.
Please note that this feature is not available for IOT Apps on cloud for security reasons.
