Using RF24Ethernet & RF24Gateway with the Arduino Cloud

 Using RF24Ethernet & RF24Gateway with the Arduino Cloud

 Pushing automation even further

 Recently, I was offered an Arduino Uno Q, Arduino Uno R4 Wifi and 1-year of Arduino Cloud access for free! This came as quite the surprise, because I was contacted out of nowhere by Per Tillisch, an Arduino Support Engineer, who offered me the devices and cloud access with no strings attached! I was quick to take him up on his offer. He stated it was due to my work contributing to the Arduino ecosystem.

In looking at the cloud access, it looks like it will be very simple to create dashboards etc, and integrate everything I want from my existing systems into the cloud! No code changes, no updates, no nothing. Just some simple changes in the NodeRed system I use.

With the current wireless IoT systems I am using, based on RF24Ethernet and RF24Gateway + wireless radios + MQTT, I also use NodeRed for managing all the data and interactions locally. This means that all I had to do was install the node-red-contrib-arduino-iot-cloud nodes, setup an API key, and use the newly installed nodes to communicate with the cloud!

See  https://docs.arduino.cc/arduino-cloud/guides/node-red/ for more information.

Right off the bat, I was able to create a simple dashboard that displays incoming Temperature, Humidity & Barometric pressure data on some charts!

 From here, it is very simple to add/remove & create new parts of the dashboard.

All of the existing Arduino devices in my network now have potential cloud access via NodeRed! I didn't have to modify any code, upload new firmware or really do much of anything! This all works with my existing systems!

The beauty of this is users can keep all their data and integrations local, logging to a database if desired etc, and still make use of the Arduino Cloud at the same time. Some data can go to the cloud, some to a local repository, and everything just seems to work in sync!

I currently have all my integrations set up via NodeRed + NodeRed Dashboard, so it is very similar already to the Arduino Cloud Dashboard, though only available locally. Using the cloud, I can now make some parts of it accessible from anywhere.

This is all very cool, I can't wait to get the new hardware!