2 Xively Setup
If you do not have a Xively account already, navigate to the demo account registration page or click on 'Free Trial' on xively.com.
Once you have finished the registration and logged into the CPM (Connected Product Management) platform, you will see the following page. If you click on the icon in the top right corner, you will be presented with your account ID which we will need for the XiFox setup later on.
To create a new device template (comparable to a Sigfox device type), expand the 'Devices' section and click 'Add new device template' in the top right corner.
Give your device template a name, for example "Outdoor motion sensor".
A device template consists of two main elements:
Custom fields
Contains custom field definitions for data that describes the type or state of a device, for example postal code, firmware version, etc. Custom fields are accessible through the API (read and write) and can be used in your custom applications like mobile or web apps.
Channels
Contains all available MQTT channels/topics through which data is published and subscribed. There are two types of channels: simple and time series. In contrast to simple values, time series values are stored by the Xively server and can later be retrieved and analyzed. Before creating a channel, think of your uses cases and decide whether it makes sense to store the value history of a channel. A channel can also be linked to an Amazon Kinesis stream which forwards the data to defined external destinations. For the purpose of the XiFox connector, you will need to create a separate channel for every data item contained in the Sigfox byte payload (e.g. humidity, temperature).
Click on the '+' sign in the channels section. Give the channel a meaningful name and choose a channel type.
After the device template has been configured, you can add device instances by clicking 'Add new device' in the top right corner of the device template page. If you need to make changes to your template, every existing device instance will automatically inherit those changes. This makes migrations very easy, as long as no channels or custom fields that are currently in use are deleted.
Select an organization to which the device will be linked. This mapping is part of the Xively blueprint that defines permissions ("who has access to what"). In this case, our device is linked to the 'TTN Test Organization', which means that all devices and users of this organization will be able to communicate with our new device.
Every device is automatically assigned a 'Device ID' from Xively. This unique device identifier is comparable with the 'Device ID' in Sigfox and will be used in XiFox to define the mapping between Sigfox and Xively.
We created a Xively demo account, a device template, and a device instance. For the XiFox setup, we will need the following information:
- Username / email
- Password
- Account ID (unique identifier if your Xively account)
- Device IDs (unique device identifiers)