CREAte your cloud account
It's free and fast!
ESPert provides a free cloud service account with selected features for anyone who wants to build their own IoT applications involving smartphone push notification, geofencing or data visualization. Every ESPresso Lite V2.0 user can create a cloud account in order to use the services
1. Creating ESPert cloud account
Go to http://www.espert.io
- Press Login button at the right corner
- Register to create account. (You need to confirm your email address after registration)
- Try login to website to make sure your account is activated.
When you login again, you will see three features indicated on the left column:
- My Smartphone
- My Geofencing
- My Freeboard
When you click on "My Smartphone", there will not be any information displayed until you proceed to download, install and run the ESPert app.
2. ESPert IoT Mobile App
Go to http://www.espert.io/app
NOTE: For iOS user, you may receive an 'UNTRUSTED ENTERPRISE DEVELOPER' message for iOS users.
In this instance, simply go to Settings > General > Device Management > 'CLICK CONNECT COMPANY' and click 'Trust'. (Works for iPhone 6 users)
push notification feature
A feature provided by Espert.io cloud service
- Use web browser to login to espert.io
- You will see in your left column, My Smartphone
- Click on the 'Push' ('thunderbolt' image) button to show Push Notification dialog box
- Noticed that a string of 16-digit smartphone key is generated (which will be tagged to your registered smartphone). You can use this smartphone key to send text to yourself through your browser (example shown below).
- Key in a text in the Message box and click Send. This text message will be sent to your smartphone.
e.g. In the message box, key in "Welcome to Espert.io push notification service" and click 'Send'
- Within a few seconds, a text notification will be received by your smartphone.
NOTE: Remember the 16-digit smartphone key for sending message on your browser URL bar. Keep this number private so avoid receiving prank messages from your friends.
You can now send a message/notification to yourself with your browser by keying in (where xxxxx is your smartphone numerical key and yyyyyy is the text message):
http://www.espert.io/MySmartphone/send?key=xxxxxxxxx&message=yyyyyyyyyy
MQTT BROKER
Publish and subscribe to MQTT broker
The ESPert cloud handles the transfer of sensor data from the ESPresso Lite to espert.io through a communication protocol called MQTT (message queue telemetry transport) on top of the TCP/IP protocol. It is a lightweight messaging protocol that uses the publish-subscribe method. Data (or message in JSON format) is sent to or 'published' or out of (subscribed) the MQTT 'broker'. We can use the MQTT websocket panel to monitor the 'message' traffic or to publish a command 'message' directly.
Connecting to broker
Go to http://espert.io/mqtt
If you're still connected to the Internet, the host, port and client ID data are auto-populated.
<Note: You'll need the client ID for Freeboard too>
In any case, the host will be mqtt.espert.io and port is 8000.
Click on Connect to start connection with the Espert.io MQTT broker via MQTT Websocket Panel
Subscribe to broker
Click Add New Topic Subscription.
A dialog box will appear where you need to use your board id to create the topic in the format below: ESPert/XXXXXXXX/#
Reading messages
Once the correct topic is entered and subscribed, a series of messages will appear.
These messages are in JSON format or readable text that is used to transmit data objects consisting of attribute-value pairs.
Publish to broker
Besides subscribing, you can also publish a command to the MQTT broker. For instance, to cause the LED on the ESPresso Lite to turn on and off, key in {"LED" : <state>} in the message box and press Publish.
State 0 : OFF
State 1 : ON
State 2 : Toggle between OFF and ON
Control the LED
When the message is publish, the onboard LED (connected to GPIO2) will turn ON. And when the command to Publish is pressed again. the LED will turn off again.
e.g ESPert/xxxxxxxx/Command
message: {“LED”: 2 }
Using HTTP (REST API call)
Instead of controlling the LED using MQTT, you can also try making REST API call e.g. HTTP. Open your web browser and try keying in
http://www.espert.io/bridge/ESPert/xxxxxxxx/Command?LED=2
where xxxxxx is the board id
The LED will also toggle ON and OFF each time the URL is refreshed.
