One of our users recently told us about an amazing IoT application for cattle management (that’s right, cows!). His setup included some XBee radios, a Digi modem and a laptop computer being used as a gateway. This laptop would send data to a device management cloud (Etherios) and finally the data was posted from there to Ubidots.
This seemed quite a complex setup that’s hard to scale and maintain. Also, as in any system, the more components you have, the higher the risk of failure. Therefore we helped him look for an alternative and found the Dragino IoT modems.
These devices are quite interesting because they can be used as gateways for projects involving Zigbee, Bluetooth and other device-to-device protocols. Once you receive the data from your devices, you can send it to the Internet either through WiFi or Ethernet. Some nice things about them:
- They can be programmed in the Arduino IDE
- They ship in a production-ready enclosure
- The price mark is below the $50 USD
With this in mind, we played with a Dragino MS14 and wrote this library to send data the from a Dragino to Ubidots. In this new setup, he’ll only need the Xbee radios, a Dragino and Ubidots.
Use this discussion to post any experiences, comments or suggestions around this Dragino Integration.