IoT apps based on SBC like Tessel 2 and Raspberry Pi

[Former Member]

Hey All,

This blog is about sharing an experience on building an IoT app based on a single board computer like
Tessel 2 and Raspberry PI. I also hope to learn more from my peers and experts in SAP IoT.

First of all, I have spent 10+ years of my career as an SAP developer and in recent times I was playing with a Tessel 2.0 to send some data from the sensor to the SAP Cloud Platform (after SAP did the rebranding). If you search in google there are plenty of articles that will help you to do so and build your interest here. To be honest, Tessel 2 is not the best of SBCs and there are better boards like Raspberry PI and LattePanda, however I did start with Tessel 2 and had a lot of issues. One of the most frustrating issues were the Windows 10 Device Manager did not recognize the Tessel 2 Device and thus Tessel 2 was not get installed. Secondly I believe Tessel 2.0 does not support USB 3.0. I obviously looked up GitHub to troubleshoot these issues and found a lot of support to get it working. One of the pre-requisites for working with Tessel 2.0 is to install node.js environment with helps to install T2 Command Line Interface to run JavaScript and gives us the basic framework to perform networking to communicate the data packets to the Cloud Platform of your choice. During this learning path I learned a lot about writing JavaScript that run on the server side. Tessel 2 comes with 2 10 pin modules that can be used to interface sensor devices like Climate Modules; etc. Tessel 2.0 does support a lot of different modules which can be plugged and played. The JavaScript code reads data from these modules and executes an infinite loop in a defined time interval to feed the data back to the Cloud Platform. SAP Cloud Platform a PAAS comes in with a IoT Application Services and can be used to register your device with the help of Device Management capabilities. A series of configuration settings can defined here to recognize the remote device and persist the data into this platform. The data now can be used for different visualizations and can be consumed by different app. I am just thrilled how a chain communications can be easily built now enabling intelligent information back to business to take smart decisions and drive predictive capabilities automatically. I earnestly ask experts and developers to share their experience and kind of work people are engaging themselves in the SAP IoT world. I hope to learn and grow! Thanks.

Regards,
Tanmoy