Node-Red and IBM Bluemix

I’m progressing, in the free time, my evaluation of Cloud IoT platforms.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, IBM IoT platform is really interesting. One of her strong point is NodeRED, a Visual Programming Language for IoT and Integration, built on top of NodeJS.

I have upgraded my Raspbian Jessie image on my RPI. With the upgrade I have found a new version of NodeRED.

Inside I have discovered, already installed, nodes to communicate with IBM IoT Watson. Nice.

IoT Gateway

An important component in an IoT Architecture is an IoT Gateway.

A Gateway is an important link between the world of Things and Sensors (and actuators) and the world of Enterprise Applications.

Normally connected things don't have the computing capabilities to run complex computation. Very often they don't have too much networking capabilities, but they are the best components to link to the physical world.
To avoid to put too much burden on the Things, in terms of computational capabilities and in term of networking we need something in between. This is an IoT Gateway.

As a part of my IoT training, I'm investigating what kind of software you can run on a "Open Source" IoT gateway.
For now, I have decided that the best platform to run a gateway is Raspberry Pi 2.

This is the liste of the software that I have successfully run on it:

• Mosquitto (MQTT) broker;
• Node.js;
• Node-Red;
• MySQL;
• Redis;
• Python;
• Oracle Edge Analytics

I think that the best messaging solution, to connect sensor nodes with the Gateway is MQTT, and Mosquitto broker seems to work perfectly.