Using Actility as a LoRa operator for IoT Hub

LoRa and Actility Overview

LoRa is a low-power, low-bandwidth, long-range radio protocol used by many devices to send their data over the air. This protocol is specifically designed for battery powered devices with little to no installation cost.

LoRa devices broadcast their data to reachable LoRa gateways, which forward the messages on the LoRa operator network. The operator de-duplicates the messages from multiple gateways and hand over the message to the “LoRa application”. In our scenario, the “LoRa application” is Scaleway IoT Hub.

Actility is a LoRa operator which can build your public or private LoRa network.

In this tutorial we are going to:

• Create a IoT Hub which to receive/send messages from/to LoRa devices
• Add a Device to the Hub to prepare the Actility-to-Scaleway connection
• Set up the Actility backend to use the Device credentials to establish a connection with IoT Hub
• Add another Device and connect it as a subscribe to receive LoRa messages

Create an IoT Hub

First, we need to create a Hub. Its role will be to distribute messages from your LoRa devices to the intended targets. Please follow this procedure to create an IoT Hub. Choose any name and any plan you wish.

Create an IoT Device

We now need to add a Device to the IoT Hub because the Actility platform will connect as a MQTT device to exchange data on IoT Hub. Please follow this procedure to do so. Give it the name you want. You can leave the default deny insecure connection setting to provide maximum security to this connection.

Once it is done, copy the Device ID and download the certificate and private key files, you will need them to set up the Actility backend.

Set up the Actility backend

Now IoT Hub is ready to exchange messages with Actility, let’s configure the Actility side:

• Go to your Actility Thingpark Enterprise console
• Click on Applications > Create and choose MQTT
• Fill in the following parameters (unlisted settings can be anything you like):
  • Hostname: your IoT Hub Endpoint, followed by MQTTs port (ex: iot.fr-par.scw.cloud:8883)
  • Account prefix: this allows you to set the MQTT topic prefix. Messages will be published with a topic like <prefix>/things/<LoRa device ID>/uplink. Type in my-app here.
  • Protocol: SSL
  • MQTT Username: your IoT Hub Device ID
  • MQTT Password: leave empty
  • Certificate: the device certificate file (ex: my-device-crt.pem)
  • Private Key: the device key file (ex: my-device-key.pem)
• That’s it, click Save button

You can check the application is up and running by going to the application page and verifying the Deployment Status box is set to Opened. When it is, your LoRa network is now connected to your IoT Hub.

Verify the we have done things right

It is time to see messages flowing on IoT Hub:

• Create another IoT Hub Device, but this time choose the allow insecure connection setting to keep this step simple.
• Let’s open a web based MQTT client such as HiveMQ Websocket Client
• Connect it to your IoT Hub with the following settings (leave the others untouched):
  • Host: your IoT Hub Endpoint (ex: iot.fr-par.scw.cloud)
  • Port: 80
  • Username: the Device ID for the Device you just created
  • Click on the connect button, the light will turn green and the connection block will collapse
• Now subscribe to the LoRa devices messages:
  • Click Add New Topic Subscription in the Subscriptions block
  • Pick any color to identify this subscription
  • Choose QoS 0
  • Use my-app/things/+/uplink as the topic, this will instruct IoT Hub to send you uplink messages from all devices
  • Click subscribe
• Your subscription now appears in the Subscriptions block and the messages from your LoRa devices will start showing in the Messages block.

Congratulations! Messages are flowing as expected.

Going further

You could leverage the power of IoT Hub to build a dashboard to display your data in a few easy steps:

• Start a PostgreSQL managed DB instance and create a lora table with the following fields: time (timestamp type) and data (jsonb type)
• Configure a Database Route to push data in there, see how to. The topic filter should be my-app/things/+/uplink. Your query should look like INSERT INTO lora (time, data) VALUES (NOW(), $PAYLOAD).
• Start a new Scaleway instance and setup Grafana, get inspiration from this tutorial (steps 1 to 14, don’t enable TimescaleDB option).
• Add widgets to your dashboard, for a graph your query could look like SELECT time, data->'DevEUI_uplink'->'payload'->'batteryLevel' as batteryLevel FROM lora WHERE $__timeFilter(time).

That’s it! Your LoRa devices data is now backed by a production-grade dashboard!

Learn more about Scaleway IoT Hub, discover how to add Devices to the hub, check the IoT Hub metrics or get started in a few clicks with the IoT Hub Kickstarts.