Connect to thingsboard

[Eching-statck]

Can it be linked to Thingsboard Cloud?

[reubenmiller]

@Eching-statck Whilst thin-edge.io does not support ThingsBoard out of the box, we're more than happy to accept PRs to add support for it. But in the meantime we took the challenge to see if we could publish some data from thin-edge.io to ThingsBoards and it only took ~30 mins or so (and I personally didn't have any experience with ThingsBoard prior to this post!)

The following instructions were used to create a manual MQTT bridge that can be used by thin-edge.io to publish data to ThingsBoard. It could be extended to also receive commands (e.g. RPCs) from ThingsBoard, but I just stopped at publishing data for now.

1. Create a device in ThingsBoard (via the UI), and get use an access token (though certificates should also work, but it requires a bit more setup, and we're only looking at "does it work")

2. Open a console on the device and install thin-edge.io

   wget -O - thin-edge.io/install.sh | sh -s

3. Create an mosquitto bridge mapping, e.g. /etc/tedge/mosquitto-conf/thingsboard-bridge.conf (the file names does not matter, but the location is important!)

   Where you should set customize the following fields

   • Modify the address to suite (here I used the cloud and MQTTS as I've already added the cloud's certificate to the OS trust store using update-ca-certificates etc.)
   • Replace {{DEVICE_NAME}} with the device's name
   • Replace {{ACCESS_TOKEN}} with the device's access token

   ### Bridge
   connection edge_to_things
   address mqtt.thingsboard.cloud:8883
   bridge_capath /etc/ssl/certs
   remote_clientid {{DEVICE_NAME}}
   local_clientid ThingsBoard
   remote_username {{ACCESS_TOKEN}}
   try_private false
   start_type automatic
   cleansession true
   local_cleansession false
   notifications true
   notifications_local_only true
   notification_topic te/device/main/service/mosquitto-things-bridge/status/health
   bridge_attempt_unsubscribe false
   
   ### Topics
   
   #
   # ThingsBoard topics
   #
   # Topic mapping: things/telemetry => v1/devices/me/telemetry
   topic telemetry out 2 things/ v1/devices/me/
   
   # Topic mapping: things/attributes => v1/devices/me/attributes
   topic attributes out 2 things/ v1/devices/me/
   
   
   #
   # Also map some thin-edge.io topics to ThingsBoard topics
   #
   # Topic mapping: te/device/main///m/telemetry => v1/devices/me/telemetry
   topic "" out 2 te/device/main///m/telemetry v1/devices/me/telemetry
   
   # Topic mapping: te/device/main///m/attributes => v1/devices/me/attributes
   topic "" out 2 te/device/main///twin/attributes v1/devices/me/attributes
   

4. Restart mosquitto

   sudo systemctl restart mosquitto

5. Check that the ThingsBoard bridge is up

   tedge mqtt sub te/device/main/service/mosquitto-things-bridge/status/health
   

   The bridge's topic should have a value of 1 which indicates it is connected to the remote MQTT broker (ThingsBoard in this case)

   [te/device/main/service/mosquitto-things-bridge/status/health] 1
   

6. Now publish some data to the device

   Using the things/ topic

   tedge mqtt pub things/telemetry '{"temp": 22.5}'
   tedge mqtt pub things/attributes '{"os": "debian-13"}'

   Using the thin-edge.io topic, te/

   tedge mqtt pub te/device/main///m/telemetry '{"batteryVoltage": 9.8}'
   tedge mqtt pub -r te/device/main///twin/attributes '{"os": "debian-12"}'

Some screenshots from some of the data that was posted: