Today’s platform update helps reduce bandwidth between the Gateway Edge Agent and the cloud, and also adds some new tools for debugging device activity.
First, we’ve added support for Concise Binary Object Representation messages through the new CBOR: Encode and CBOR: Decode workflow nodes. CBOR is a popular format for shrinking the size of JSON payloads, and through these new nodes, users can reduce the bandwidth of messages between the Gateway Edge Agent and Losant’s cloud platform, resulting in lower connectivity costs.
In an Edge Workflow, construct a JSON payload to send to the cloud – such as a device state report or a message on a custom MQTT topic – and run the payload through the CBOR: Encode Node.
Then, in an Application Workflow triggered off that topic, the original content can be parsed back into JSON using the CBOR: Decode Node, and the payload contents can be saved as device state or used otherwise to modify your application.
Rollout of these nodes can lead to a significant cost savings for large-scale IoT applications as most cellular connectivity providers charge based on data bandwidth; CBOR encoding can reduce bytes transferred by 10% to 40%. We recommend considering these new nodes if connectivity costs are a major factor in your solution.
Today’s release also includes several enhancements to the debugging panels available on a device’s overview page
The goal is to make it easier for our users diagnose hardware issues and resolve them with less effort, and we are confident these updates deliver on that goal.
As always, this release comes with several minor features and improvements, including:
We’re continuing to grow our Template Library with new entries designed to demonstrate Losant best practices, shorten time to market, and improve end user experience.
We recently added an Endpoint Retrieving Edge Data template that demonstrates how to fetch data on demand from an edge compute device in response to an experience endpoint request. While the experience user’s request is held open, a command is sent to the device to retrieve the requested data, which is then published back to the cloud on a custom MQTT topic. From there, the data is sent as the reply to the pending request.
While we recommend persisting any necessary application data to the cloud, many users have requested a demonstration of this complex roundtrip from the cloud to the edge and back to the cloud. Exposing this as a template allows it to be imported into an application and modified for each user’s specific use case.
With every new release, we listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to improve the platform while maintaining its ease of use. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.