- Hi, my name is Sapta,
and I'm a Senior Product Manager at AWS.
Welcome to the demo series
on how to build a weather station using AWS ExpressLink.
For those who are new to ExpressLink,
it is a connectivity software that powers a range
of hardware modules developed and offered by AWS partners
such as Espressif, Infineon, and u-blox.
These connect-ready modules include AWS-validated software
which makes it faster and easier for you to securely connect
almost any product to the cloud
in a fraction of time and cost.
Products include medical devices, industry sensors,
and consumer products.
Developers of all skill levels
can quickly and easily transform their products
into IoT devices
without having to merge large amounts of code
or have a deep understanding
of the underlying implementation.
The connectivity modules
come preprovisioned with security credentials,
allowing developers to offload
the complex networking and cryptography tasks to the module,
and develop secure IoT products
in weeks rather than months.
Modules that use AWS IoT ExpressLink are preprogrammed
to seamlessly integrate with over 200 AWS IoT services,
including AWS IoT Core.
Please visit our product catalog page
which is in the description link below.
In addition to building the weather station,
we will show you how with a few lines of code,
you can easily connect, send, and receive data from AWS.
In the following video of this demo series,
you will learn how to build the weather station
using the required hardware.
In the third video, we will demonstrate the ease of writing
a simple source code with few lines using ExpressLink
to build the weather station.
In the fourth video,
we will go through the steps to add an ExpressLink module
to an AWS IoT Console
and show real-time data.
In the fifth video, we will store data on the AWS Timestream
with just one line of SQL code.
And lastly, in the final video, we will demonstrate
how to visualize data using Amazon Managed Grafana.
So without further ado,
let me introduce our technical experts.
- Hi, my name is Dan Gross,
and I am a Senior Developer Advocate
for AWS IoT and FreeRTOS.
In this video series,
we'll be exploring hands-on engineering
and how we use ExpressLink
deploying a weather station into the field.
We'll see some hardware, some software, and some cloud.
- Hi, my name is Joe Julicher,
and I'm a Senior Software Development Engineer
on ExpressLink at AWS.
I will be working alongside Dan and Sapta
to showcase how quickly and easily we've been able to build
the weather station using ExpressLink
and manage the data.
- [Dan] So here we have the weather station sketch
that runs on the Arduino Uno.
You can see in the setup function
that we have a number of commands
that configure the ExpressLink module,
and these are only needed to run once.
Here, you can configure the endpoint, the topic,
the SSID, and the passphrase.
Once those are configured,
you don't need to run those again.
And so we'll comment them out.
Then you can see in the setup command,
we have the AT CONNECT.
Now, when the board starts up, the setup function will run,
and the serial connection
will then connect to the ExpressLink.
Here, we connect by issuing the command AT+CONNECT.
It's that simple.
Now, when we wanna send data,
we go to the sendWeather function in the Arduino sketch.
And here,
we have AT+CONNECT again
just to make sure that we're still connected,
and then we issue AT+SEND1 over the serial.
And there, we send all of our weather station data
in JSON format,
and that's all you need to do.
- [Joe] You just heard how simple it is
to set up the software to communicate within ExpressLink
to make the connections in the cloud.
Very quickly, I wanna show an example
of the connections needed from the post microcontroller
to an ExpressLink device
to actually show the hardware connections.
So this particular schematic you see on screen
is a design I'm doing for a different project
for the Open Hardware Group.
And this one is using a ESP32-C3-based ExpressLink
from Espressif.
In this design,
you see this is the minimum connections needed.
We have just a couple of bypass capacitors
for power filtering.
This design needs to have a 32-kilohertz crystal oscillator
for time-keeping purposes.
It helps when you're doing the sleep command,
and also it maintains a real-time clock
inside the ExpressLink
for validating certificates and other security functions.
And then there's the connections to the host processor.
The connections to the host processor at a minimum
are just the receive and the transmit signals.
But for a more advanced application,
you'll also want the event for getting synchronous events
back from the ExpressLink like a connect or disconnect.
You also want WAKE and RESET.
The WAKE is so that you can wake up an ExpressLink
that you have put to sleep.
You might put an ExpressLink to sleep to save power.
And then you'll use the RESET signal
if something were to go wrong
and you need to reset the ExpressLink
all the way back to its initial states.
Not the factory reset, this will just be a power-on reset.
So those are all the signals.
Putting that schematic down
next to your existing host processor,
hooking at these five connections
allows your ExpressLink to enable an IoT connection to AWS
for any host processor out there.
We've even connected this to something like the PIC10F200,
which only has six IO pens and 64 bytes of RAM,
and ExpressLink was able to get
that simplistic application all the way to the top.
(upbeat music)
- Thanks, Dan and Joe, for introducing us to AWS ExpressLink
and showing how simple it is to use.
(upbeat music)