Asset Tracking in Cellular IoT Using Nordic Thingy: 91 Multi-Sensor Prototyping Platform

Team

Jesus Rigoberto Gaitan Castellanos, Joseph Keaveny, Himanshu Thakur

Overview

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the connected devices for the purpose of collecting and exchanging data with each other and applications over the internet. The number of connected devices globally will be 125 billion in 2030 and Global data transmissions are expected to increase 50% per year, on average in the next 15 years. The title of our project is “Asset Tracking in Cellular IoT Using Nordic Thingy:91 Multi-Sensor Prototyping Platform”. The objective of this project is to perform in-depth research on wireless cellular IoT technologies and use one of them to develop an asset tracking prototype. In this project we use Nordic Thingy:91 Multi-Sensor Prototyping Platform. It suits a variety of single device low power cellular Internet of Things (cIoT) designs. First of all, we setup the IoT kit and connected that to the cellular network. The nRF9160 cellular module transmit sensor data to the cloud using cellular network for analysis and then using the API to pull the data from the cloud to the smart phone app. We created python scripts to read information from the cloud using the REST API. Then expanded into the map libraries such as Folium and ipyleaflet to look for the best way of implementing a real map solution while using python scripting. The implementation of Kafka with Flask to create the web page and have all the data in the background allowed us to have a seamless communication between the different components of our system. The project provided an opportunity to expand our knowledge on setting-up hardware components, handling and representing IoT data, importance of seamless communication, and meeting the technical demands for IoT projects. It helped to gain valuable experience in working with IoT technologies.