Software for hub to Tiki communication

 

The logic for deploying a local ‘integrating’ hub device is to allow the very detailed aspects of individual sensor usage and initial data collection to be carried out on dedicated satellite devices, each focused upon their own specific measuring/monitoring activity - but which can each be programmed to report back to the integration point in a consistent way. That integration point will also be ‘local’ so that communication from satellites can use whatever local communication method makes most sense from a proximity, complexity, and security point of view.

Communication from a local integration hub to a central Tiki however will nearly always use WiFi from the local hub to a local network WiFi access point, although a fixed wire ethernet connection to a switch/router on the local network can obviously always also be used.

The local hub can then connect to the internet to access the domain where the central Tiki system is running i.e., just like a browser does, but only for a set of specific transactions that can be actioned programmatically by the local hub device and interpreted by a Tiki API.

Allowed transactions from a Tiki API usage perspective include at least the following:

• Uploading/downloading of files to/from Tiki File galleries.
• Addition of new, updating existing or downloading existing Tiki tracker items.
• Looking for specific content on a designated wiki page or in a tracker item.

The development of software functions for hub devices that can be used to connect to the Tiki API has to take into consideration the systems/software that would commonly be used on the local ‘integrating’ hub device. So, choice of language and the methods for the development of Tiki API communication functions is critical and the current approach adopted here is to use ‘C’ with cURL as the primary candidates since:

• standard ‘C’ can be readily integrated with Python and is also natively supported on a wide range of Single Board Computers (SBCs) and microcontroller platforms; plus
• cURL and the libcurl library provide a comprehensive range of networking functionality.

A working set of Tiki communication software has been developed and extensively tested in some applications that are documented here in subsequent web pages, and this code can now be downloaded from this GitHub site.

 

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