Amazon IoT

(and how to make an internet-connected kitty motion detector)

What is Amazon IoT?

It's a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.

- Amazon

But how is it different?

• It can support billions of devices

• It can support trillions of messages

• It's inexpensive

• It's reliable

• It's secure.

• It's fast.

• It's [freaking] Amazon.

How does it work?

• Two major components are the Device Gateway and the Rules Engine.
  

• The Gateway adds devices as "things." 

• Messages from devices are filtered and routed by the Rules Engine.

• The Rules Engine routes messages to actions.

• IoT provides a pub/sub system for hardware via the message broker.

And for the visual learners...

Sample Use Cases

• Autonomous Machines:
  IoT => DynamoDb & Machine Learning

• Machine Maintenance:
  IoT => Kinesis & SNS

• Pizza Ordering Button:
  IoT => API Gateway, Lambda, & DynamoDB

How are messages sent to IoT?

• IoT supports publish and subscribe via MQTT protocol and publish via HTTPS.
  

• For browser-only applications, MQTT messages can be sent and received via web-sockets.
  

• IoT has SDKs for Android/iOS, Java, Python, JavaScript (Browser and Node.js), and embedded C that simplify the message broker and IoT security. 

Can I connect *any* hardware?

• Nope.
  

  • It has to be able to support TLS 1.2 for MQTT or SSL certificates for the REST API.

• Sorta.

  • You can tether the hardware to a computer or Raspberry Pi. Or the device can just be a computer running the SDK.

  • There are some proxy hacks for outlying hardware.    

One Last Thing [Shadow]...

• Devices can have virtual "shadows" (thing/device shadows)
  

• Shadows can:
  

  • Show current online/offline state

  • Persist and show last saved state values

  • Persist any future desired device state 

• When a device comes online, IoT will ask the device to match its desired state.
  

Our Picture Again

Amazon Iot Test Project:

A motion detector that texts (via lambda) and emails (via SNS) when something [kitty] is detected.

Kitty Detector Parts List

• Tessel 2

• PIR Sensor

• External Battery Holder + Batteries

• Lead Wires

• 3-D printed case (optional)

• 1 moving kitty (optional)

The Code

• Tessel Hardware/Amazon IoT Code:
  https://github.com/lynnaloo/kitty-detector

• Serverless Framework/Lambdas:
  https://github.com/lynnaloo/go-away-kitty

Demo Time!