How To Use A Helium Integration

Let’s start with the basics: What the heck is a Heli­um Inte­gra­tion, and why would you even need one? 

An “inte­gra­tion” is what allows the raw data that’s com­ing from your Heli­um sen­sors to be actu­al­ly used. Whether that’s show­ing a dash­board of soil mois­ture, or tem­per­a­ture, or if you’re track­ing the num­ber of peo­ple who park in a spot, you’ll need an inte­gra­tion to actu­al­ly under­stand that data.

Let’s do a quick review of how infor­ma­tion moves through a LoRaWAN:

It starts with the Device send­ing out a Pack­et over radio waves. That Pack­et is received by a Hotspot. The Hotspot sends it on to an LNS (LoRaWAN Net­work Serv­er), which will typ­i­cal­ly decode the pack­et and send it on to an Integration.

Now, an Inte­gra­tion does­n’t have to be a dis­play; it could be any use of that data. Let’s say you have a Heli­um sen­sor mon­i­tor­ing soil mois­ture under a sprin­kler man­i­fold. If that sen­sor sud­den­ly reports that it’s super wet, you may want to have your Inte­gra­tion just shut off any water to the manifold.

Of course, you might want to know if that soil mois­ture is because of a leak­ing pipe or just that it rained recent­ly, so you prob­a­bly want to tie in data from a local weath­er sta­tion, like this:

To see all that data, you need an Inte­gra­tion. In this case, we’ll be using the Meteo­Sci­en­tif­ic inte­gra­tion, which also has a Rules Engine that allows you to cre­ate rules and work­flows around what hap­pens when it rains, or gets too cold, or does any one of a num­ber of things that your sen­sors can report on. *Full dis­clo­sure: I own and run Meteo­Sci­en­tif­ic and invest­ed in the soft­ware it runs on, which is called UplinkEngine.

For now, I’ll walk you through how to con­nect your Con­sole to an Inte­gra­tion. We’ll get to actu­al­ly dis­play­ing the decod­ed data in the next post.

The Meteo­Sci­en­tif­ic App is free to sign up for, and the small­est device plan is $.50/month, which is com­pet­i­tive with any oth­er inte­gra­tion option out there. 

Integration Options

There are lots of oth­er inte­gra­tion ser­vices, like Dat­a­cake, Ubidots, Tag.io, and of course, Nova’s 1663 option for large com­mer­cial users. Each of them offers some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, and depend­ing on what you want, they may be a good match for you. They all will have the same gen­er­al steps that we’ll fol­low below for MetSci. You’ll gen­er­ate an API key, add it to your LNS, fig­ure out how to read the incom­ing data, and then (for most of them), auto­mate actions based on that data. 

Relax, we won’t do ALL of that in this post. 🙂

I’ll make an assump­tion now in order to save us some time and space, and that’s that you already have your sen­sor up and con­nect­ed to the Heli­um net­work. If you don’t, start over here with the Meteo­Sci­en­tif­ic Con­sole.

Chirpstack Device Setup — Example

Once you have a device set up, it’ll look some­thing like this weath­er sta­tion, which is an exam­ple from the Chirp­stack LNS on console.meteoscientific.com:

You can see that the sen­sor is up and report­ing pack­ets con­sis­tent­ly, and the sig­nal strength is good enough. Now, this is just the Device. To cre­ate an Inte­gra­tion, start by find­ing your Appli­ca­tion in Chirp­stack. Click on the Appli­ca­tion, then look for the Inte­gra­tion tab, like this:

Click on the Inte­gra­tion tab, and then hit either the “plus” but­ton if you don’t cur­rent­ly have one, or the pen­cil icon if you already do (which is the case in this example.)

Once you’re in the inte­gra­tion, we’re going to tell Chirp­stack where to send the data from our sen­sor. This sends our data to the “Inte­gra­tion.”

To do that, we’re going to open anoth­er tab and for our Inte­gra­tion account. In this case, that’s the MetSci (Meteo­Sci­en­tif­ic) app. There we’ll gen­er­ate an API key, then copy and paste a few things back into the Chirp­stack Inte­gra­tion window. 

MeteoScientific App

So, over on app.meteoscientific.com, look for your account name, then API Keys, then go to the top right and hit the “Add API Key” blue but­ton, like this:

Once there, you’ll see the option to add an API key. API stands for Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face, and it’s the code that allows two pro­grams to talk to each other. 

Add the key and name it some­thing that makes sense, then save. You’ll need to add a “ver­i­fi­ca­tion code” which will be sent to the email you signed up for the App with. 

You could name it Super Duper Dou­ble Trou­ble Rad­i­cal Wiz­ard Key. The name does­n’t real­ly mat­ter, it just has to make sense to you. Once you see it in your API KEYS list, we’ll move on to the next step: Add the Device you have over on Chirp­stack to the MetSci App, then using the API key to con­nect the two.

Gath­er your DevEUI, AppEUI, and App­Key from your Chirp­stack account for the Device you want to add, then in the MetSci App, go to Core–>Devices and Add Device, like this:

It’ll dis­play a screen where you enter in all your var­i­ous EUIs and keys. Fill those in, then hit Save at the bottom.

For now, don’t wor­ry about Heart­beat Inter­val, Pub­lic View­ing, Para­me­ters or Posi­tion, we’ll fill that in lat­er. Hit Save, and you’ll see your Device. 

Look for the “How to Receive Uplinks” tab and expand that, then care­ful­ly fol­low the instruc­tions. It’ll look like this:

Use the copy/paste but­tons to grab your “End­point URL” and the HTTP Head­ers Autho­riza­tion. We’ll paste those in over on the MetSci Con­sole, back in the Inte­gra­tions tab we left open from before.

Go back to Chirpstack

In Con­sole, on the Inte­gra­tions –> HTTP edit box, start by choos­ing JSON, then fill in the Event End­point URL.

Now hit the “Add Head­er” but­ton, and add in a Head­er with a “key” of Autho­riza­tion and a “val­ue” past­ed in from your app. That will start with “Bear­er” and then have your API key in there. I’ve already done mine, but just for ref­er­ence, this is what it looks like:

You’re done!

That’s it! You’ve con­nect­ed your Con­sole with an Inte­gra­tion using an API Key. Wait for your sen­sor to send a pack­et, and you’ll see the pack­et show up in your MetSci app. I’ll save the next step (tak­ing the decod­ed data from the pack­et and dis­play­ing it in the app) for anoth­er post. For now, pat your­self on the back, you’ve made the last big con­nec­tion in a long set of geeky rules, well done!

If you’re dig­ging this set of instruc­tions, I’d love to have you as a MetSci Con­sole and App cus­tomer. How­ev­er, I’m more psy­ched to just have you using Heli­um in gen­er­al, so what­ev­er com­bo of LNS and Inte­gra­tion you use is fine with me. If you’re hav­ing trou­ble, drop me a note in the com­ments below and I’ll do my best to help you out!

Rock ‘n roll!