ClearBlade was made with quick uptime and scalability in mind. This step-by-step deployment tutorial will showcase the ease and rapid implementation of the ClearBlade IoT Platform and the ClearBlade IoT Edge Platform. You’ll see how easy it is to build an IoT solution that runs in both the cloud and the edge, the goal being to gather data from the edge that would come from machines and displaying that back to end-users.

Concepts Demonstrated:

• Import a reusable system via IPM
• Visualize data with a Portal
• Create a new Edge
• Deploy custom logic to the Edge
• Real-time synchronization between Edge to Cloud

We’re going to use the ClearBlade IoT platform running in the cloud along with an edge, and you’ll be able to see it come alive and see the visualization for the end-users.

Prerequisites:

• Linux or Mac OSX
• ClearBlade Sandbox Account (Create)

1. Log into the ClearBlade IoT Platform: https://platform.clearblade.com/#/dashboard
You will see that you have no solutions or systems installed.

2. You could start from scratch, but it is easier to import something by clicking on “Install” and import from our IPM community, where we have a number of open source packages available to import with different solutions.

3. Drop the URL in and “Fetch!” that asset, and then import it.
For Pump-Demo Purposes we are using this link: https://github.com/aallsbrook/pump-demo
It includes all the assets you would expect: visualizations, logic, edge definitions, devices, … ready for you to use.

The new pump-demo system/solution is now available and you can look at the status of an industrial pump. At this point, this is just the solution running on the cloud since you haven’t connected any devices or edges yet.

4. To look at the portals, start by clicking “Portal”.

5. Now click on one of the portals (“Pump Alert” is the only one here).

You can have as many visualizations as you might want and you can see the web responsive UI interface for incoming data.

6. Click on the left fly out. You can see that currently there is only a single pump device in the list – select it to see the basic data about this particular pump. Notice that we don’t have any real data coming in from our gateway devices.

7. Go back to the dashboard. Let’s connect the actual device with the IoT gateway streaming that information. We are going to start by defining an edge.

• Click on “+New” next to “Edge”, and name the new edge – for demo purposes it will be named “pumpEdge”
• Click on “Generate” and “Create”.

8. You now have a new Edge defined in your cloud waiting to be set up and installed. By clicking “Show Edges” you will see your different Edges and how there are no IPs set up at this moment.

9. You can click on the “Settings” > “Config” of your Edge, look at its configuration, and choose to install this edge on a variety of process architectures.

10. For the purposes of this demonstration, let’s run it locally. There can be multiple steps when you pull these files down, but you can simply grab the script, to have it installed for you, by clicking “Download Edge Installation Script”.

11. Next, pull down the install and SH script and open your Terminal.
For this demo, the first thing you’ll do in Terminal is move the install file into a new folder called “Pump”

12. Open Terminal and execute those actions:
– get into your downloads “cd /Downloads”
– move the file into your new folder “mv install.sh pumpEdge”
– make the file executable “chmod +x install.sh”
– provide your password to run the install – it’s now getting the files from the cloud and getting it set up.

13. There are different ways to run the edge. “Copy” the base command and “Paste” that into the Terminal.

14. Now it will create its own database and starts pulling data down. We haven’t picked yet what we want to run on the edge, so there are devices in the actual system, but they are not deployed on the edge. Let’s look at it, click on “Auth” > “Edge”.

You’ll see ports, configurations, and metadata about what’s happening on the processor at the edge.

15. To get data at the Edge, go to “Deployments” > “Create a new deployment” and call it “pumpDeployment” for example. You can pick a subset of information that runs to that particular Edge.

16. Choose to have the entire “Devices” table always deployed in sync by clicking “Sync Table” under “Devices”. This means all the devices, the shadows, etc., will all be in sync from edges to the actual platform.

17. Now you can add one service. You’re not going to add all of our logic, you won’t add all of the javascript microservices, but you will run the one that we designed to run off the edge.

Let’s do it: “Services” > “edgeDeviceUpdate” select “Deploy” and “Sync”.

18. Here, you can decide how often you want to pull this data off the edge. You can set up a timer that runs and data pulls every second by deploying it on the edge under “Timers”.

19. Now pick where it goes under the “Select Edge” menu. In this demo there is only one edge so only this one edge would get this logic, but as you scale this number gets much larger. When you have thousands of pumps in the field, how do you set that up and configure it, and how do you make them unique from each other? This deployment model makes that reusability very simple. Hit “Save” and it’s immediately updated.

20. Let’s quickly go look at our Terminal. It pulled down all the record tables and is generating statistics. The edge is now running remotely in the field talking to the pump and is starting to pull-off data.

You can now go back to the visualization and see the live data: the rotations, temperatures, amps, voltage – all this information is now coming back live to with just that small amount of deployment model, certainly taking a huge amount of the challenge of pushing large systems to many different places has been very made simple with the ClearBlade IoT platform and the ClearBlade IoT Edge Platform.