Quick Start Guide

AIRcable SensorSDK Kit Quick Start Guide

Welcome and thank you for buying our AIRcable SensorSDK Kit.

On this pages you will find a guide that will get you quickly on the road with your brand new Kit.

The kit is composed of several parts. One of this pieces is the SensorSDK Server CD-ROM which will allow you quickly get your sensors online, and test the system.

System Setup

First of all you have to copy some files out of the cdrom and install some applications in case you don't have them all ready.

Copy and uncompress Server files

In the cdrom there's a folder called SensorSDK-Server and inside you will find a file called image.zip you need to uncompress this file in any place where more than 800MB are available.

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Install VMware

If you haven't done it yet then you need to install VMware vmplayer, the installers for MS Windows and Linux are included in the CD-Rom, if you're running MacOS you will have to get VMware Fusion.

Running

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Once you have everthing setup, you can start vmplayer and open aircable.vmx or just double click on it's icon to get it opened. Don't plug in your Bluetooth dongles yet, wait until the virtual computer booted.

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It will start loading

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The first time you run it, it will ask you about vmware guest tools, you can tell it do not download and ask it to remember your settings as it is useless for this system.

Once it is completed booted it will get you to the ip screen.

IP Screen

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From this page you will be able to tell what is the ip the vm got from your dhcp server, which will allow you later to connect with your browser, from this window you can also make some basic management of the Linux installation.

Now it's the time to connect your Bluetooth dongle, on both MS Windows and Linux VMplayer will try to attach the dongle to the virtual machine automatically. On MacOS you have to ask it to do it at least the first time.

If you ever need to do any maintaince and need to login into Linux then the username is aircable and the password is aircable as well.

OpenProximity

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As you may know SensorSDK runs inside a Bluetooth Linux framework called OpenProximity. Which you can access by just pointing your browser to the ip address you got on the previous step.
The window you will see looks like this picture. Pay attention that you see your Bluetooth dongle listed there. As soon as you see them listed you're ready to continue.

OpenProximity is tested with Firefox, Chrome and Safari, use any of this to make sure you're using a compatible browser. IExplorer sometimes fails and it's not 100% compatible.

Accessing SensorSDK

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Once you got into OpenProximity you can access SensorSDK by selecting plugins.sensorsdk from the drop down list that you find on the top right.

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After you selected SensorSDK you will be presented this screen. From here you will be able to monitor SensorSDK and your nodes. Now let's setup SensorSDK so it does something useful.

SensorSDK Setup

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To access SensorSDK setup you have to click on the SensorSDK Admin button on the navbar. You need privileged access in order to continue from here, if you haven't log in yet you will be asked to do it. User name is admin password is aircable

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This how the administration interface main page looks like. You will have to interact with this page many times. As you can see there's a box on the right that will allow you to easily follow the missing steps for a good setup.

Campaign Setup

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A campaign describes the rules that let SensorSDK decide which of the devices that OpenProximity discovered needs to be handled by SensorSDK. We have all ready created a campaign with the default values for a SensorSDK Dev Kit installation for you on the cdrom.

Dongle Setup

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Dongle setup is the part of the process where you let OpenProximity know which of all the available system dongles will be used by SensorSDK.
In case you have more than 1 dongle make sure you create a Sensor dongle for each one of them, because as of SensorSDK 0.3.6 there's a bug in the code that will make the system fail randomly.

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This little menu on the right will allow you to see all the dongles that are available right now. Each time you modify a campaign or a dongle OpenProximity and SensorSDK gets restarted, so it may happen that when you get the webpage the list is empty (as in the example) in those cases hit refresh until the list gets something. If your dongle still doesn't appear then make sure it's connected to the VM.

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This is how it looks like when it knows of a dongle. Copy and then Paste the address, as there's no scripting yet that does this for you.

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Each dongle can have a name, in this example Generic Dongle.
A Bluetooth compatible radio can handle up to 7 connections at the time, so theoretically you could make the Connections number equal to 7, but as there is some stuff that neither OpenProximity or SensorSDK have control so it's not recommended to use more than 6 or 5 as safe values.

Email Server Setup

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SensorSDK has a built-in alarm system, in order to get alarms delivered it uses email. So you have to setup your smtp server settings.
Take into account that passwords are stored as plain text, so make sure you don't let anyone access your server or they will know your email username and password.

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Once you press save SensorSDK will try to reach your email server and tell you if configuration is ok or not.

Wait until SensorSDK finds your nodes.

While you were setting everything up SensorSDK was doing it's job and trying to connect to your nodes if they ever became visible. If they haven't yet you can hold and press the right button on the LCD screen until it says FTP Open and then wait until the sync phase is done.

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If it works you will notice that the stop sign on line 5 of the configuration wizard will turn to a green light. You can hit refresh until it does it.

Templating

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SensorSDK uses some templates to generate the emails when alerts gets triggered.
The system also includes some basic factory templates, on this page you can ask to fill up the templates for you. Don't forget to select Save changes or it will not do anything.

User Creation

Each person that could get an alarm, needs to be registered into the system. You do it by creating new users and assigning it's email address.

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First you have to select a username and a password.

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Then after pressing save you can set it's name, last name and email.

Creating Alarm definitions

This is the last stage for getting a full SensorSDK setup. On this part of the process we will let SensorSDK know when alarms will get triggered. For example let's create a no data alarm, no data allows us to know if any of our devices ever stop reporting.

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Each alarm mode needs different settings, and have different meaning for the same internal variable, on screen interactive help will help you get through.
On this example we choose no data so we only need to tell the system after how many seconds with no reporting we start considering there could be a problem.

We also need to select the devices we want this Alert Definition to cover and the users we want to notify in case it's needed.

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The last important part on this page is the reset time if no data got into the system (meaning the alarm situation never got resolved) then the alarm will get reset after reset time seconds with no data, and will eventually send a new email.

Upgrading

SensorSDK and OpenProximity are evolving all the time, this vm image can be upgraded to get new code. You will need to log into the vm either via ssh or via a log-in on the IP page (go into the Advanced Menu and select quit).

In order to log in you will need a username and password they're both aircable no matter how you're trying to login.

Updating is easy as this next two steps:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

When calling sudo you might be asked to type in your password again.

Getting the VMware image

You can find a list of VMware images we have created in our download section.

Keeping in touch

We have a mailing list you can use to get in touch directly with SensorSDK developers and users, you will only need to register before you can start sending or receiving any emails, please do so at: http://groups.google.com/group/aircable

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