ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for monitoring, data processing, visualization of data along with device management.
Why Thingsboard?
It supports industry-standard IoT protocols – MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP. ThingsBoard combines scalability, fault-tolerance, and performance to capture the device data for processing and monitoring. It provides its gateway server that can communicate with the attached devices.
Build around Netty Framework due to which it provides support for many protocols and applications. New Hardware protocols can be added by just adding Inbound and Outbound channel handlers for new protocols with the netty framework.
Thingsboard features
1) Security
Support for provisioning and management of devices with credentials management. Custom security rules for each protocol can be applied.
2) Dashboard and Data Visualization
Built-in support for 100+ widgets components. Collect and visualize data from devices and assets in Dashboard with widgets.
3) Telemetry
Analyze incoming telemetry and trigger alarms with complex event processing. Support event storage Api to capture Telemetry metrics.
4) Rest API and RPC Support
Data workflow can be designed using Rest API and RPC Requests.
5) Push Device Data
Support to push Device data to other systems in real-time.
6) Integration with Different Message Queues
Different connectors are available to connect with different implementations of message queues. The multiple message queue implementations: Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, Azure Service Bus, and Google Pub/Sub are supported.
7) Hybrid Database support
Stores all entities in SQL databases and telemetry data in the NoSQL database.
8) Rule Engine
In-built rule engine, to configure rules for device state and different notifications or alarms can be generated based on the telemetry of the device. Data processing rules can be changed at runtime based on the device state.
9) Deployment, Standard and Cluster mode
On-premise and cloud deployments are supported along with Standard and Cluster mode are supported
10) Alarms Management
Create and Manage alarms related to devices, assets, and customers, etc. Rule policy can be applied to raise alarms for device state changes.
Use Cases:
Thingsboard IoT platform supports broad use cases specifically in fields of Fleet tracking, Smart Farming, Smart Metering, Smart Energy, Smart City, and Commercial Home Automation Solution.
1) Smart Farming
Smart farming is a combination of hardware (IoT) and software (SaaS) to capture the data and use data to manage all the operations on the farm, both pre and post-harvest.
2) Smart Metering
Smart Metering solutions are used to study consumption patterns.
Alarms are integrated with smart metering with rules to identify any abnormalities or energy offenders
3) Smart Energy
Smart Energy is syncing different energy producers with energy consumers to optimize energy consumption based on data points.
4) Fleet management
Different types of fleet management solutions can be derived
- Vehicle leasing, financing, maintenance, licensing, tracking, and diagnostics.
- Supply chain management.
- Driver management, Speed management, Fuel management
Workflow :
Conclusion :
Thingsboard is a good choice to develop IoT Solutions. Its source code is available with Apache License.
