A great site has recently been launched as a demonstration dashboard for Sierra Wireless's AirVantage, the application enablement part of the IoT Acceleration Platform, and for Zenario.

First presented at the CTIA in Las Vegas in September, this website, code-named "Blueberry", is designed to show the capabilities of AirVantage, in an imaginary but plausible real estate management scenario.

Alarms, maps and graphs

The site, which is public access, shows how alarms can be handled — for intrusion detection, moisture detection, and frost. It can be viewed as a dashboard, and when an alarm occurs the site makes an audible "ping" to notify the user, and can send an email and/or SMS alert.

Locations can be monitored on a map, and there are historical charts showing the times and locations of where alarms have occurred.

Blueberry slide for blog

Portal architecture

The portal runs on the Zenario content management system, onto which we have built a number of software modules to enable the IoT portal functionality. Those modules turn a Zenario CMS into an Assetwolf customer portal. Styling and small items of customisation turn that into the Blueberry system.

The portal connects with the remotely monitored properties via Sierra Wireless's AirVantage platform. AirVantage receives both application and connectivity data from the properties. It acts as an aggregator and mass storage platform.

In simple terms, AirVantage receives data from the properties and stores it, although its capabilities go far beyond that. For instance, the user can manage the lifecycle of the embedded applications, and the mobile subscriptions from multiple operators.

We use AirVantage in two ways: the portal queries the AirVantage API to for most data retrieval and to send commands to a remote device; however, when handling alarms (such an intrusion alarm) which requires immediate notification, AirVantage uses the AMQP protocol to send data immediately to the portal.

Trying out Blueberry

Blueberry is free to try, access it here.