You Don’t Become a Smart Building Specialist by Passing on Opportunities like this! ^_^
When Nnamdi called and suggested that we do a follow-up meetup leveraging Google Cloud Platform for IoT devices, I was ecstatic, not because I was a pro at GCP or anything. I hadn’t done anything related to IoT or Cloud Analytics in quite some time because of how overwhelming my school workload got. Not to brag or anything, studying architecture is one of the most tasking (in a good way) activity one can do in school. Also, I was looking forward to brushing up on my knowledge of IoT. You don’t become a Smart Building specialist by passing on opportunities like this (Lol). The meetup was on visualizing sensor data with the Google Cloud Platform.
The project for this meetup was provisioning an IoT device, that checks for temperature, Humidity, and Ammonia concentration data, to send telemetry feeds to GCP for analysis and data visualization. I was especially glad to work with this team.
For this particular project, more than one account was linked and a group of individuals had their part to play in building it. I handled setting up a project on GCP, generating product keys and creating Pub/Sub Topics (this where the provisioned device would be sending telemetry feeds to). In my research, I rediscovered that Cloud IoT Core, a service in Google Cloud Platform serves as the entry point into GCP for IoT devices. Cloud IoT Core is a managed service that permits you easily connect huge fleets of devices directly to Google Cloud. It comprises two main components, Device Manager and Protocol Bridge. You can learn more about Cloud IoT Core here.
The challenge encountered at this point was enabling Billing, though I was put in charge of setting up the project on Google Cloud Platform, I couldn’t Enable billing because I wasn’t the one that started the creation process. I learned that only the account responsible for creating the project on GCP (which is tied to the Cloud billing account), can enable billing. A Cloud Billing account defines who is responsible for paying for a given set of Google cloud resources, this can also be linked with more than one Google Cloud Project.
The session I facilitated kicked off by introducing attendees to Cloud IoT Core and walking them through setting up an account with GCP. Just like any standard web service, one would be required to create an account to benefit from all that is to be offered. This generally entails creating a project, enabling Billing (discussed earlier) and enabling APIs. Thus the APIs needed for this project were Cloud IoT Core and Pub/Sub. APIs are imperative parts of GCP that allow projects to transcend from storage access to machine-learning-based image analysis to cloud platform applications. To do this, one can simply select the API library and search for them respectively, once Billing has already been enabled.
Find how to create a project on GCP for an IoT device built with the Arduino Board (ESP32 device) here
In general, the meetup was an interactive one, both presenters and attendees got to learn more about the process of visualizing data on Google Cloud Platform. I can’t wait for the next phone call suggesting to take on more adventurous IoT hacks and challenges.
