Creating smart spaces nowadays means taking advantage of a variety of technologies, choosing the most suitable ones, and binding them in one ecosystem. With the help of cloud services, we can receive useful data (information about lights, temperature, CO2 concentration) and react to its changes from anywhere. That’s what the ‘IoT Smart Spaces’ project is about, and we’ve implemented it in our isolutions Barcelona office. 

We have set around the office and configured several Minew S1 Temperature and Humidity sensors (1) and S4 Door sensors (2), that send data to Minew G1 Gateways (3) through Bluetooth.

Gateways are connected to our network and use the internet to send filtered Bluetooth packets to the IoT platform in the cloud via messaging transport protocol MQTT. As a cloud solution, we use Azure IoT Hub. And for a secure connection between gateways and our cloud service a signed certificate was created.

After successfully obtaining the data, we can display it in real-time or/and store it in a database (CosmosDB in our case). As a serverless streaming analytics tool, we use Azure Stream Analytic Job. It was configured to get data from IoT Hub, run a SQL-like query and generate an output that can be used as an input of other tools. As an example, we have filtered S1 sensor data into a separate output that is used later in PowerBI for creating a live dashboard:

Also, part of this project is a .Net Core Web API that reads data from the CosmosDB database and implements HTTP/S protocol: GET operations for the front end part to visualize sensors data and POST for triggering some events or delegate event creation to the Azure platform. We can receive information about reaching undesirable temperature/humidity levels or the status of an opened window with the help of a push notification server and Azure Functions. Sending notifications in real time might be very helpful, especially when users are not using the application at that moment.

Apart from these sensors, we can also control light switches by triggering an Azure function, manage air conditioners through a web and a mobile application and control plant watering.

Overall, IoT Smart Spaces can be customized according to clients’ needs in many ways. The core idea is to use cloud services along with a lot of smart devices to add security, optimize energy consumption and simply bring comfort to any space. In addition, it is a perfect opportunity to gain knowledge and experience in cloud technologies as well as get to know better the full cycle of a software solution.

However challenging sometimes it might be, it is exciting to take part in the implementation of this project in the isolutions office in Barcelona.