Part 1 — IBM Watson & NodeRed, IoT Application Development

In this series, I will take you through the process of developing an IoT application that involves

• How to use IBM Watson free service to connect an IoT application to the cloud
• How to use IBM NodeRed to visualize sensor data generated by IoT devices
• How to use the IBM device simulator to generate simulated sensor data reading

Setting up an IBM cloud

• Use this link to login or signup http://www.bluemix.net
• Then click on create resource

• Search for an“IOT” in search bar and select the “Internet of Things Platform”

• Fill out the details and choose the “Lite” which is free
• Choose the region nearby to your area, finally, click “Create”

• Now click “Launch”

• or go to www.bluemix.net and click on the highlighted option

• Click “launch”

Creating a device type

• First, you need to create a device type in your IBM account
• Go to the device tab and then click on device types then click on Add Device Types

• You can choose the type of device either a Device or Gateway
• Then give it a name and click next

• Now you can fill the details or leave it open then click Done

• Now you have two options

1. To use a real IoT device like Raspberry pi or Esp8266
2. or you can use IBM IoT device simulator

• For now, we will use the simulator, and in the next article, I will discuss how to use a real IoT device

Creating simulated devices on IBM Watson IoT Platform

• Go to the IBM settings then device simulator
• Turn on “Activate Device Simulator”

• Then a new tab appears at the right bottom of the screen

• Click the tab and then click “Create simulated Device”

• Click on the “selector create device type” in order to select the device type that you want to simulate

• I choose a “Web_Simulator” device type, when you click the device type this appears

• Change the code part as follows and set the schedule 4 x every minute,
• This will generate a random number for temperature in range 0–40 and for humidity in range 50–100
• Then save it

Creating NodeRed on IBM Cloud

• Go to IBM Cloud using this link www.bluemix.net
• And choose your cloud service, for me I am using IoTAbeni1, but for your case, you can choose “Internet of Things Platform for Medium”, which we created at the begging

• Then click on the link “Visit APP URL”

• Click on “Go to your Noe-Red flow editor”

• Click the + Sign to open a new tab

How to program in Node-Red to use sensor data generated by the simulated device and display them in a graphical format

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