Category: IoT

In the past articles I independently sat up an Eclipse Kapua service using Docker containers and installed Eclipse Kura on a Raspberry Pi. Now its time to connect these and see what happens.

Preparing Kapua

At first, since Kapua is a multi-tenant installation, we need to create an organisation and an admin user in this org.

(I mostly followed the upstream documentation here:  kapua/kuraKapuaDocs.md at develop · eclipse/kapua · GitHub )

After logging into the Kapua webUI using the default admin user “kapua-sys” and password “kapua-password”, we need to create a new tenant or organization.

Unfortunately, tenants in Kapua are called “accounts” which is a little bit confusing (at least for me). Therefore we need to go to “Child Accounts” in left pane and add a new account by pressing “Add” in the upper left corner.

Let’s us as example the account “ACME123”:

• Account Name: ACME123
• Organization Name: ACME Org
• Email: admin@acme123.org

Then we press “submit” and click on the new created account.

Before we create a user under this account, we have to change some settings under Settings tab below. Basically every boolean setting has to be set on true except “TagService”. Every other setting should not be changed.

In the users tab, we now can add a User:

• Username: user123
• Password: Kapu@12345678

The password needs to have at least 12 characters, with special characters, upper and lowercase and numbers. Because this is used in devices it should not be to easy to guess in a real world scenario.

The should now be created and we need to give this user some rights. For this, we have to switch from the master account to new ACME123 account. This can be done in the upper right corner using “Switch Accounts”.

Now we can go to the “Users” view and select the user123 user.

In the lower part we have “Role” and “Permissions” tabs.

In the “Role” tab, we add the “admin” role. After that we go to “Permissions” and grant all rights to the user.

Now we have everything ready in Kapua to connect!

Configuring Kura to connect to Kapua

After setting up Kura as described in Installing and running Eclipse Kura on a Raspberry Pi B (Model 1) ,

we can edit the cloud configuration settings.

At first we login to the Kura web interface (admin/admin).

Then we got to the “Cloud Service” view and fill in the data under “MqttDataTransport”:

• Broker URL: mqtt://[IP address of the kapua service]:1883/
• Topic.context.account-name: ACME123
• Username: User123
• Password: Kapu@12345678
• Client-id: “rpi-1” (this needs to be the same as “device custom-name” in CloudService

Then go to “DataService” and set “connect.auto-on-startup” to true.

All other fields remain unchanged.

Now its time to clck “Connect” and the device is shown as connected,

In Kapua, the newly connected device is now visible under “Devices” and “Connections:

 

Kura is now fully configured and ready to send some data.

Sending Data to Kapua

As you can see, our data sections Kapua is empty. That is because we did not yet send any data to it. So in this example we will user Example publisher deployment package, which can be obtained from Eclipse marketplace.

This bundle sends some data to provided Cloud (in our case Kapua). We will use it to verify our connection. Click here to visit Example Publisher page.

Click on download button and copy the link address (it has .dp extension) and paste it into Kura -> Packages -> Install/Upgrade -> URL.

Now we need to activate the service:

Click “+” right from search box. Under Factory select org.eclipse.kura.example.publisher.ExamplePublisher, set a Name of your choice and click Apply.

Example publisher then automatically starts sending data to Kapua, which can be verified in kura.log file or in Kapua itself (kura.log file is in on Raspberry Pi in /var/log folder).

Data in Kapua can be observed under “Data”.

This looks very promising and I will continue with the next steps:

• import Kapua into OpenShift and create a template for an automated deplyment
• connecting sensors to the Gateway and generate some useful data!

Today I start with taking a deeper look at Eclipse Kapua. It is a modular IoT cloud platform to manage and integrate devices and their data.

My goal for the next weeks will be to demonstrate a multi-tenant capable installation of Eclipse Kapua on OpenShift, connecting several IoT devices and gateways to it.

As a first step, I will setup Kapua as a standalone application using pre-built docker containers.

Then I will use a raspberry pi running Eclipse Kura to connect to Kapua and send test data.

Next steps will be the port to OpenShift making use of persistent storage and scalability. And connecting sensors to the raspberry pi gateways to send  some useful data.

Setting up Kapua if you have a running docker service is fairly easy:

You need to have a 64bit architecture, Docker version > 1.2, roughly 8 GB of free RAM and access to the internet to fetch the pre-built containers from docker hub.

docker run -td --name kapua-sql -p 8181:8181 \
    -p 3306:3306 kapua/kapua-sql:0.3.2
docker run -td --name kapua-elasticsearch \
    -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 elasticsearch:5.4.0 \
   -Ecluster.name=kapua-datastore \
   -Ediscovery.type=single-node \
   -Etransport.host=_site_ \
   -Etransport.ping_schedule=-1 \
   -Etransport.tcp.connect_timeout=30s
docker run -td --name kapua-broker --link kapua-sql:db \
    --link kapua-elasticsearch:es \
   --env commons.db.schema.update=true \
   -p 1883:1883 -p 61614:61614 kapua/kapua-broker:0.3.2
docker run -td --name kapua-console --link kapua-sql:db \
    --link kapua-broker:broker \
   --link kapua-elasticsearch:es \
   --env commons.db.schema.update=true \
   -p 8080:8080 kapua/kapua-console:0.3.2
docker run -td --name kapua-api --link kapua-sql:db \
    --link kapua-broker:broker \
   --link kapua-elasticsearch:es \
   --env commons.db.schema.update=true \
   -p 8081:8080 kapua/kapua-api:0.3.2

Each line will then fetch the container and start them.

In order to make the service accessible, I also add some firewall rules on my docker host:

firewall-cmd --add-port 8080/tcp
firewall-cmd --add-port 8081/tcp
firewall-cmd --add-port 1883/tcp

Thats all. Now you can acces the Kapua Web GUI on

http://<ip_of_docker_host>:8080

The default credentials are:

Username: kapua-sys

Password: kapua-password

Additionally there is a message broker running at

tcp://<ip_of_docker_host>:1883

Username: kapua-broker

Password: kapua-password

And a RESTful API under

http://<ip_of_docker_host>:8081/doc

Username: kapua-sys

Password: kapua-password

That really was easy. Lets see what we can do with it. Stay tuned for the next part: Installing Eclipse kura on a Raspberry Pi.

Currently I play with IoT devices and connected “things”, and as much they fascinate me, mostly they are quite locked and when the vendor loses interest, money or disappears from the market, these things mutate to ubiquitous threads and begin to scare me.

Sure, most of the stuff is built on Linux, but passwords or access is blocked and if there is no merciful vendor that takes care of automated updates they rot and become vulnerable.

Additionally, sometimes even the communication protocols are unknown, insecure and create a lock-in to the original vendor and its “intellectual property”.

In an ideal world there will be an Open Source based software stack that is capable of a standard based communication, secured connection with controlled data flow and ways to manage the zillions of devices connected to and managed by the central management.

And, although the world is not perfect, something like this seems to exist: In the Eclipse community, there is the IoT Community!

I specifically looked into the IoT device middleware Kura  and the cloud based management platform Kapua.

With these tools and a secure MQTT based communication, an Open Source, standards based IoT stack can created:

This not pure academic stuff, but real code! Interesting companies like Eurotech, Bosch and my employer Red Hat are investing into these projects.

My goal in the coming weeks will be to look deeper into these projects, make them available in an on-premise installation and have a lot of fun. And yes, I will write about that here. So stay tuned.