Iot-with-Bot`s

This is the official repository with all code used By Eduardo Petecof and João Pedo P.P during their lecture about how to integrate IoT devices with Chatbots using IBM Cloud.

If you want to reproduce this lecture first thing you need to do is create an acount in IBM Cloud

Architecture Diagram

Parts of the puzzle

• IBM IoT Platform
• Function
• Watson Assistant
• NodeMCU
• Omega2+
• Mobile App

Functions

In this folder you will find the actions that are executed when the bot identifier some command that the iot device should excute.

Inside its there are two folders, one for the NodeMCU+ESP2866 device and other for the Omega, each one with your proper actions.

Functions are pieces of code hosted in IBM Cloud that you can call to perform an action though an http request. They are very usefull if you want to run part of your code that requests a large amount of resources, needs to be highly available and scalable and you do not have how to provide it, or you simply do not need a server to be on all time, consuming energy, wainting to be called, for that reason is highly recommended to make use of functions.

The process of hibernation and activation of an action is pretty simple. After you have written your code and saved it the action will become a container image, this is the hibernate state. Once you called it by an http request you action will wake and perform what has been written, in other words, it will be created a container from your image that runs just your code. At the end, when your code finish to run the action will hibernate again, in the techical words your container has run every it can do and there no use for it anymore so finish itself.

Example of function:

function main(param){
    if (param.example != undefined) return {msg: param.example}
    else return {msg: 'param is null'}
}

Example of param

{
    example: "Hello Wordl",
    example01: 23,
    example02:{
        inside01:32,
        inside02: "Inside Wordl"
    }
}

Watson Assistant

Watson Assistant is a service offered by IBM Cloud. It acts like a natural language interface between the application and the end user working as virtual agent.

The service offered by IBM is based on intents and entities to build a dilog flow. Intents can be defined as a piece of phrase that expects an action, for example: "what do you know about IoT? " or "can you tell me about natural language ?", they both can be represented by the intent knowSomething. An easy way to model intents is to look at the verbs of the input your user can use, beacuse in general, verbs expects some kind action when they are used.

Entity is the subject that of your phrase, or what your user is talking about, in the above example, "what do you know about IoT? " and "can you tell me about natural language ?" IoT and natural language can be represented by the entities IOT and NL respectively. To make it clear, entities are the flavours of a pizza.

Once you model your intents and entities you can build yout dilog flow, you can do this whatever you want, you just need to create dilog node and set triggers conditions to each node and define answers to them.

In this project it was used to identify the commands that user could enter like:

• Faça o led do esp piscar
• Ascenda o led vermelho do omega

Once the command was identified the bot itself can call a function hosted in IBM Cloud to send a request to the IoT Platform, sending a command or getting information from one device.

To put this kind of functionality in you bot follow the next steps:

1. Open de dialog node
2. Open the JSON editor
3. Add this piece of code in the same lavel as output

"contextx":{
    "private":{
        "my_credentials":{
            "user":"<YOUR_ACTION_USER>",
            "password":"<YOUR_ACTION_PASSWORD>"
        }
    }
},
"actions": [
    {
      "name": "/<YOUR_ORG>_<YOUR_SPACE>/actions/<NAME_OF_YOUR_ACTION>",
      "type": "server",
      "parameters": {
        "color": ""
      },
      "credentials": "$private.my_credentials",
      "result_variable": "$result"
    }
  ]

Now your bot is able to call a function without a server.

Device code

This folder contains all files used in each device to connect to IBM IoT Platform and perform the required actions.

NodeMCU Files

Omega2+ Files

Omega2+ is development board with a linux kernel inside specifically designed for IoT applications, according to the maker "World's smallest Linux server".

His linux kernel allows its to run any programming languages, in this specifaclly project is was used Node.js to connect and perform the commands sent by the IoT Platform.

If you have an Omega2+ or some development board similar you just need to copy the content of the Omega`s folder to your board and follow the next steps:

1. run npm install;
2. fufill the .env file with your IoT credentials and save

   IOT_ORG=<YOUR_IOT_ORG_HERE>
   IOT_ID=<YOUR_IOT_ID_HERE>
   IOT_DEVICE_TYPE=<YOUR_IOT_DEVICE_TYPE>
   IOT_AUTH_KEY=<YOUR_IOT_AUTH_KEY>
   IOT_AUTH_TOKEN=<YOUR_IOT_AUTH_TOKEN>

3. run npm start

Mobile app

Contributors

• Eduardo Petecof Mattoso
• Joao Pedro Poloni Ponce

Special Thanks

• Danilo Paschon -> without him there will be no project