Mounting a Gateway

In this tutorial you will see how to mount an IoT gateway connected to the Oficloud service. This gateway will be needed for the rest of tutorials. You can mount so many gateways as you need.

The materials needed are:

  • A single-board computer (SBC).

Requirements for the single-board computer:

  • A Linux distribution can be installed on it. Theorically could also work on any OS where Node JS can be installed.
  • If it doesn't include Wifi you need to add a Wifi dongle.

These are tested single-board computers:

  • Raspberry Pi 3 B or B+.

You can find lots of alternatives looking for 'Raspberry alternatives' at a web search engine.

STEPS

You can follow the next steps to mount it or download an image and mount it into the SD card of your SBC (a software like Win32Imager will be needed to mount the image).

1. Install Linux
Install a Linux distro in the SBC. What has better worked for us in a Raspberry 3 B+ are Raspbian Stretch Lite and Ubuntu Mate for Raspberry Pi .

2. Download base project
Create a folder for your node js project and download oficloud-base-project.
$ git clone https://github.com/juanjo75es/oficloud-sdk-base . 

3. Configure SSH
Configure a ssh service. You can find lots of tutorials for every Linux distro. In case you are using a Raspberry Pi 3, you can connect it temporaly to a screen with an HDMI cable so that you can configure it.

4. Configure Wifi
Configure a Wifi connection or connect a network cable to it so that you get access to the Internet.

5. Install needed packages
Install git, npm and NodeJS. You can find tutorials online.

6. Done
That's all. You can start working on your project.

Optional
You can download a design for a stick here.