Simple Iot enables you to add remote sensor data, telemetry, configuration, and device management to your project or product.

Implementing IoT systems is hard. Most projects take way longer and cost more than they should. The fundamental problem is getting data from remote locations (edge) to a place where users can access it (cloud). We also need to update data and configuration at the edge in real time from any location. Simple IoT is an attempt to solve these problems by embracing the fact that IoT systems are inherently distributed and building on simple concepts that scale.

Simple IoT provides:

• a single application with no dependencies that can be run in both cloud and edge instances
• efficient synchronization of data in both directions
• a flexible UI to view configuration and current values
• a rules engine that runs on all instances that can trigger notifications or set data
• extensive support for Modbus -- both server and client
• support for the Linux 1-wire subsystem.
• flexible graph organization of instances, users, groups, rules, and configuration
• integration with other services like InfluxDB and Twilio
• a system that is easy to extend in any language using NATS
• a number of useful Go packages to use in your custom application

See vision, architecture, and integration for addition discussion on these points.

See detailed documentation for installation, usage, and development information.

Motivation

This project was developed while building real-world IoT applications and has been driven by the following requirements:

• Data (state or configuration) can be changed anywhere — at edge devices or in the cloud and this data needs to be synchronized seamlessly between instances. Sensors, users, rules, etc. can all change data. Some edge systems have a local display where users can modify the configuration locally as well as in the cloud. Rules can also run in the cloud or on edge devices and modify data.
• Data bandwidth is limited in some IoT systems — especially those connected with Cat-M modems (< 100kb/s). Additionally, connectivity is not always reliable, and systems need to continue operating if not connected.

Core ideas

The process of developing Simple IoT has been a path of reducing what started as a fairly complex IoT system to simpler ideas. This is what we discovered along the way:

1. treat configuration and state data the same for purposes of storage and synchronization.
2. represent this data using simple types (Nodes and Points).
3. organize this data in a graph.
4. all data flows through a message bus.
5. run the same application in the cloud and at the edge.
6. automatically sync common data between instances.

Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages. -- Ava Raskin

These constraints have resulted in Simple IoT becoming a flexible distributed graph database optimized for IoT datasets. We'll explore these ideas more in the documentation.

Support, Community, Contributing, etc.

Pull requests are welcome -- see development for more thoughts on architecture, tooling, etc. Issues are labelled with "help wanted" and "good first issue" if you would like to contribute to this project.

For support or to discuss this project, use one of the following options:

• Documentation
• Simple IoT community forum
• #simpleiot Slack channel is available on gophers.slack.com
• open a Github issue
• Simple IoT YouTube channel
• subscribe to our email newsletter for project updates.

License

Apache Version 2.0

Contributors

Thanks to contributors:

Made with contrib.rocks.