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Make battery powered Wi-Fi sensors with Cricket and ThingsBoard
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Make battery powered Wi-Fi sensors with Cricket and ThingsBoard

Introduction

In this guide we show step-by-step an integration of Things On Edge - Cricket Wi-Fi module to ThingsBoard. In a few steps we make a Wi-Fi battery powered sensor and visualise its data in ThingsBoard without coding and programing. It can be any type of sensor but in this sample we make a Temperature sensor.

We walk through the following steps:
1) Making a battery powered Wi-Fi sensor
2) Connecting the sensor to WiFi network
3) Configuring the sensor to send data to ThingsBoard

Things On Edge

Things On Edge designs an easy to use, ultra-low power Cricket Wi-Fi modules. They are designed to make fast & easy IOT end nodes such as sensors, buttons, switches etc.; power them directly on batteries for a very long time; and integrate to a huge ecosystem of software and internet services. All this without writing a single line of code.
Cricket plate
image

Prerequisites

Hardware

  • Things On Edge - Cricket Wi-Fi module
  • 2xAAA battery holder
  • 2xAAA batteries

Make a battery powered Wi-Fi sensor

Cricket WiFi module comes with a built-in temperature sensor. In this example we do not need any other hardware peripherals. However, in order to get more accurate temperature readings it is highly recommended to use external sensors e.g. DS18B20/+

In this example we simply attach batteries to the Cricket Wi-Fi module and the device is ready to go. Note: please use fresh and good quality batteries e.g. Duracel, Energizer

Asm plate connection

Connect Cricket to Wi-Fi network

step 1 - press button on TOE

step 2 - connect device to TOE

step 3 - connect device to WiFi

step 4 - connect TOE to WiFi by device

Configure Cricket to send data to ThingsBoard

Now we can configure Cricket to transmit the temperature readings to ThingsBoard.

Cricket supports both MQTT and HTTP protocols and we are going to use the HTTP protocol for the integration. We have to make sure we have the Access Token from ThingsBoard as shown below: image

Now we can go back again to Cricket’s Config panel and complete the configuration.
A complete URL, which we are going to use to send data to ThingsBoard should look like this:
https://thingsboard.cloud/api/v1/ADD YOUR TOKEN HERE/telemetry

We also define the following payload format:
{“temperature”:#temp}
Where #temp tag is automatically replaced with the temperature value prior it is sent out to ThingsBoard.

A complete Cricket’s configuration can look like below: image

Once Cricket is configured we must exit from the Config panel by pressing the reset button in the top-right corner as shown on the image below.
Disconnect from TOE

If we configured our device as shown above the device will be sending data to ThingsBoard every 10 minutes. The data is presented on the graph as shown below: image



Additional information

Cricket Wi-Fi module - Documentation

Your feedback

Don’t hesitate to star ThingsBoard on github to help us spread the word. If you have any questions about this sample - post it on the issues.

Next steps