IoT Platforms

Sensor to Cloud

IoT platforms that include hardware and service from sensor data collection to posting the data to the cloud.

Supplier	Summary	Data Publishing Limits
NCD	Wireless sensors, gateway, cloud. \| Individual WiFi gateways for MQTT, AWS, Azure, Losant, Does a cellular gateway exist? DigiMesh wireless network. NCD Industrial IoT Edge Computer LTE Cellular WiFi Ethernet \| Many wireless sensors including vibration, impact, current \| Accelerometer and other sensors only report the value at the time of transmission. HOWEVER: Level crossing (in both directions for accelerometer/tilt) triggers wake-up and data send, plus samples before/after event are recorded. Fully user configurablee. The minimum transmission interval is 13 seconds or 0.0756 Hz (samples/sec). A unique sensor S/N and Node ID identify the sensor. Code samples for Raspberry Pi, Visual Studio, LabVIEW®, Arduino, Python, and more to change settings and examine raw sensor data. Some sensors may be externally powered. Sensors may be connected to a modem to access raw sensor data byte values. NCD recommends connecting 20 or less wireless sensors to each gateway (exception is the powerful IoT Edge Computer). Send data to popular cloud platforms such as Microsoft® Azure® IoT, Losant, and MQTT using NCD Micro Gateways. \| The $180 PR55-17A USB modem allows you to wirelessly connect your PC to a sensor, interacting with the raw data. NCD offers an industrial cellular edge computer option for $400 based on Node-RED. However, the sensor data stream to the edge computer is limited to the wireless sensor highest transmission rate of 13.2 Hz. How to choose a vibration sensor. \| Industrial Vibration Sensor V3 Product Manual	Push data to whatever cloud solution you like. MQTT.
SpotSee	Data collected is delivered to SpotSee Cloud. \| Sensors: impact, vibration, tilt, temperature, humidity. GPS \| Cellular options uses obsolete 3D/2G, 4G not available till 4Q 2022 Their device records acceleration, tilt, temperature and humidity. The device is IP67, except for the temperature and humidity sensors. Acceleration is recorded in all three directions (X,Y,Z) and all three roll (tilt) directions are recorded as well. Tilt is an angle, not angular velocity. Between each data transmission interval, the maximum (+ or - direction) is recorded locally, and then the max for each direction is transmitted. Alarm conditions (peak thresholds) may be set for each accelerometer axis and direction, as well as the three roll/tilt directions, temperature, and humidity. When an alarm threshold is exceeded, the data is sent immediately (or as soon as the gateway 3G/2G connection is made). IMPORTANT: The device will record in high resolution for 1, 2, ... up to 128 sec the detailed waveform when an alarm condition occurs, so at the end you can download this data and graphically inspect and analyze. THIS IS A FANTASTIC FEATURE. Acceleration is recorded at a rate of up to 4 kHz (4096 samples/sec). Acceleration pre-filter is 4 ms or 250 Hz max (can be lowered). A GPS option is available. The GPS data is only stored locally (not transmitted via cellular gateway). However, the coarse location can be inferred from cell towers using the data on the cloud. They don't offer a White Label option.
Disruptive Technologies	Postage size wireless battery powered sensors securely transmit data to a nearby 'Cloud Connector'. The 'Cloud Connector' comes in ethernet and cellular versions for relay of the messages to a cloud based server. Access the cloud data via webhooks or REST API. Battery life is 15 years for a fifteen minute transmission interval. The sensor value transmitted is the value at the time of transmission (not the min, max, or avg value). In Studio, you can perform analytics on the transmitted values, acquiring the min, max, avg, etc. No accelerometer / vibration or tilt options. Data is encrypted from sensor/microcontroller to cloud read more. \| Google Cloud is employed.	Fifteen (15) minute sensor data transmission intervals is the default (1 message very 900 sec), and the minimum interval is 30 seconds (87840 messages/month). The $650 Starter Kit includes five sensors and one year of service. The cost is $24/year per cloud connector for the cloud service.
MONNIT	Sensor to wireless gateway to cloud. \| Sensors: 80+ wireless sensor types. Can't find sensors on website, but sales can identify them for you. The accelerometer only sends the vibration data at the instant of transmission, all events since the last transmission lost. :-( temperature, humidity, light, thermocouple, water, soil moisture, infrared motion, ultrasonic range, AC current, 3-Phase current, switch, voltage, resistance, accelerometer & vibration, pulse, pressure, gas, air velocity, air quality, differential air pressure, vehicle detection, propane tank level, Unable to find GPS option. \| You need to buy a $275 gateway to connnect up to 100 sensors to their cloud, or your cloud. Your cloud solution will cost $250/gateway to unlock, or $2399/gateway for a reseller license. You can push data from up to 256 sensors to the Monnit Basic for free. After that you need to pay for the Premiere cloud services or unlock to send to your own cloud. \|	Minimum transmission interval is 1 minute under the Premiere service.
BEHRTECH MYTHINGS \| Laird Connectivity	BEHRTECH MYTHINGS provides the IoT platform & cloud services. Laird Connectivity provides sensors and wireless modules. \| Sensors: temperature, AC current, ultrasonic/pressure, tracking (GPS), proximity, open/close switch, coarse accelerometer. \| Everything from sensor to cloud. \| Built on AWS (Amazon Web Services). \| Nearly impossible to get any useful details from their website. \| Headquarters in Concord ON CAN.
myDevices	NOTE: The data sent at the time of the transmission is the value at that time, NOT the max/min value since the last transmission. This could cause the complete loss of an event if the event is less than the transmission interval (limited to 60 sec). \| No local storage of the data recorded. Unsure if an alarm (threshold crossing) is supported, but even if it is, if multiple events occur within a transmission interval, all but one event will be lost. \| Many sensors: switch, proximity, liquid level. Accelerometer: TE 8911 vibration sensor, 10 kHz. Tilt angle: Radio Bridge IP67 high precision tilt sensor, 0 to 180 deg. output to ?? \| LoRaWAN network. Network agnostic (helium, Spark, and many others). \| Azure, AWS, helium, and more. \| Cloud Gold Plan is $500/mo. Requires $2500 setup fee for White Label branding and general configuration. \| Mobile app option. \| White Label option. partnership options
Very	IoT hardware, software, and smart product (custom) development. They will design a custom IoT solution for you. White Label available. \| Mobile app development. \| Hardware enginereing (PCB, enclosures, ... \| Machine Learning \| Testing, Support & Maintenance. \| Bozeman, MT USA
ALTHEN Sensors & Controls	High end sensors and DAQ devices. A wide range of sensors including inclinometers, accelerometers, etc. No prices on the website.
BeanAir Wireless IIoT Sensors	Wireless sensors send data via low power Willow WiFi as MQTT to IoT Gateway. Gateway sends data to cloud via MQTT. \| Specialization in shock, vibration, inclinometers. Willow TH temperature and humidity device in June 2022. All Wilow® sensors integrate a real time clock (RTC) so that each measurement is date/time stamped. External power may be connected. Headquarters in Berlin, Germany. \| Difficult to get a response out of BeanAir, and their three USA distributors.
Zipit Wireless Inc	Global IoT cellular connectivity - but they do much more. They have a partner network that can fully support IoT development from sensor to cloud.
Connected Development	Custom IoT design company. /td>

Microcontroller to Cloud

IoT platforms that include hardware and service from a microcontroller to posting the data to the cloud.

Supplier	Summary	Data Publishing Limits
Particle	Includes WiFi / Cellular IoT hardware, cloud based database to store data, and webhooks to push the data to other cloud based systems. The 'Free Tier' permits sending a 1024 byte message from one cellular device every 27 seconds. The 'Growth Plan' at $300/mo allows a cellular device to send a 1024 byte message every four seconds. Secure and efficient data transmission from the IoT devices and the Particle cloud server.	One cellular device can send a 1024 byte message every second (1 Hz) for $1200/mo.
Tulip	"A connected frontline operations platform that connects the people, machines, devices, and the systems used in a production or logistics". Node-RED edge devices. Using connectors, A Tulip app can initiate an HTTP or SQL query. Connectors are a Tulip feature that allows you to send data between HTTP APIs, SQL databases, OPC UA servers and Tulip. Tulip supports 3 types of connectors: HTTP, SQL, OPC UA (connecting CNC machines and PLCs). The HTTP connector supports REST and SOAP. TLS (for security) is supported. HTTP GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE methods are supported. HTTP data is in JSON or XML. You can push data from Tulip edge devices to the Tulip cloud. Last fall they discontinued their gateway device, so now only their edge devices are supported. Other edge devices can push data to Tulip using Node-RED. The NCD cellular gateway / edge device runs Node-RED. For about $9k you can connect 20 wireless sensors within 2 miles of each other and push that data to Tulip. Summerville MA USA

Cloud Only

IoT platforms that provides cloud service (only) for receiving IoT data.

Supplier	Summary	Data Publishing Limits
Blynk (2021)	Blynk's IoT platform begins with software installed on the IoT device. Data is pushed from the IoT device to the Blynk Cloud as a TLS encrypted message. A mobile app is built right on a Android or iOS phone and then the end user may remotely interact with the IoT device through a rich set of widgets such as charts, displays, buttons, etc. The data on the Blynk Cloud may also be accessed from an online Blynk Dashboard, or a custom web datashboard can be created to access the Blynk Cloud through the Blynk API. Over the air firmware updates of the IoT device are supported. A single account can manage multiple organizations and users, with unique permissions for users. The standard rate for publishing a sensor value from the IoT device to the Blynk Cloud is one per second per sensor (virtual pin), or ten simultaneous values per second. Blynk claims under their White Label option, they can support rates as high as 1 kHz (1000 messages per second), but that would need to be tested. User experience indicates sending data via Blynk.virtualWrite() for legacy system takes 100 ms.	Ten simultaneous messages from one sensor every second (10 Hz). The first paid tier is $5/mo for up to 10 devices and 5 users, plus a one-time charge of $5/device. The PRO plan is $41/mo for 40 devices and 20 users. The White Label plan is $600/mo for up to 10,000 devices and unlimited users.
Fogwing Industrial IoT Platform	Cellular modems and routers take sensor/microcontroller data as RS232 or RS485 and transmit it to the Fogwing IoTHub. The cellular modems accept data via RS232/RS485, MQTT, UCP/UDP, Modbus CSD, SMS, or AT Command. (NOTE: You still need to build the sensor + microcontroller device or PLC that provides connectivity to the cellular modem). An IoT Edge Gateway is also available. White Labeling option available. \| IIoT Platform Pricing 'Community' for $0/mo for 2 devices. 'Startup' $8/mo for 10 devices. 'Growth' $45/mo for 100 devices. AI Driven Asset Management Prop plan is $100 per 25 asset / month. \|	'Growth' IIoT 14M messages/month and 14M Commands/month over 100 devices. +100/month for White Label option.
InfluxData	InfluxData provides a fully managed and hosted cloud system for data ingestion, storage, and analytics. The version 2.0 system is capable of managing multiple users (customers) within a single subscription, and their data can be kept segregated by using “bucket” categorization. Charting, alerting, and high availability is supported. Pricing is very reasonable. Particle Webhook to InfluxData
Ubidots	Ubidots is a complete cloud based IoT Platform that can manage customers, devices, and provide data analytics and dashboards (charting). The Professional subscription is required in order to manage multiple customers and provide them with a private dashboard (50 users, 200 devices, up to 20 channels/variables per device). The number of users at each subscription tier is the constraint when each customer has only one device (50 users/200 devices; 200 users/1000 devices; ..). Ubidots calls a channel a variable, and a channel value a dot. Particle Webhook to Ubidots
ThingSpeak	The ThingSpeak IoT Platform allows you to aggregate, visualize, and analyze live data streams in the cloud. Data can be sent to ThingSpeak using both REST and MQTT APIs. Data analysis and visualization is performed using MATLAB apps. A ThingSpeak Alerts API allows you to send email alerts. Particle Webhook to ThingSpeak	The free account permits publishing up to four channels at a message rate of up to every 15 seconds (or longer).
Thinger.io	Thinger.io is a Open-Source cloud IoT Platform. Data is stored in buckets, and endpoints are used to execute a service such as sending a SMS, email, or calling a REST API. Devices, dashboards, buckets, endpoints, and file systems can be organized into a Project. The Project Manager can then be used to assign users, and in that way organize devices to a particular customer. Thinger.io also supports branding. A unique Thinger.io instance can be assigned to a particular brand, and in this way multiple brands can be created, each with a unique list of projects / customers, users, and devices. As of May 2020, cloud hosted and fully managed instances are available on Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean (Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are offered for On-premise licenses only). Particle Webhook to Thinger.io
ThingsBoard	The ThingsBoard IoT Platform supports HTTP, MQTT, and CoAP APIs. It has a rich set of features including a Dashboard, Rule Engine (node flow based), and Trendz Analytics. You can sign up for a free Community Edition subscription to test it out on an unlimited number of devices. A Live Demo Server is available for sandbox testing. ThingsBoard provides an online live demo server, but in order to use it for a commercial application, you need to install the ThingsBoard software on a local server, or a cloud based server such as Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, etc. Particle Webhook to ThingsBoard
Adafruit IO	Adafruit IO is a free cloud based IoT sevice for the display of IoT data to a custom dashboard. Multiple feeds are supported, they may be public or private, and you can configure triggers to react to specific limits relative to your data values. The notifications feature will alert you when no new data has been received for your feed after the specified amount of time. Integrations to IFTT and Zapier are included. Particle Webhook to Adafruit IO	The free account is limited to 10 feeds (channels) and 60 messages per minute.

Cellular

IoT platforms that provides cellular service for the posting of IoT data to the cloud.

Supplier	Summary	Data Publishing Limits
Hologram	Provides cellular IoT hardware and they provide the SIM + cloud service. Cloud connected dashboard and REST API. \| Flexible Data and High Volume Data Plans. Flexible Data plan for USA $0.70/mo + $0.08/MB. \|
Zipit Wireless Inc	Global IoT cellular connectivity - but they do much more. They have a partner network that can fully support IoT development from sensor to cloud.

Tulip

Using connectors, A Tulip app can initiate an HTTP or SQL query. Connectors are a Tulip feature that allows you to send data between HTTP APIs, SQL databases, OPC UA servers and Tulip.Tulip supports 3 types of connectors: HTTP, SQL, OPC UA (connecting CNC machines and PLCs).

The HTTP connector supports REST and SOAP. TLS (for security) is supported. HTTP GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE methods are supported. HTTP data is in JSON or XML. NOTE: HTTP is good between cloud connections, but it has too much overhead for use on a IoT microcontroller. For our purposes, it will be necessary to push data from our IoT device to a IoT cloud service (via MQTT or other), and then push data from the IoT cloud service to Tulip.

The Tulip Platform Bulk API service is based on the bearer authentication specification (also called token authentication) within the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework, an HTTP authentication scheme that uses security tokens (or bearer tokens) as part of submitted API calls over HTTP. See RFC6750 for details. In order for a device to POST data to a Tulip table, it must securely store a public token (API Key, username, & password) on the device. Use HTTP/1.1 with basic authentication header POST a JSON string to a Tulip table. You may push data at a rate of 1000 to 5000 records per minute.

You can push data from Tulip edge devices to the Tulip cloud. Fall 2021 they discontinued their gateway device, so now only their edge devices are supported.

Tulip Edge MC and Edge IO support natively OPC UA and Node-RED. OPC UA (Unified Architecture) is a cross-platform protocol for machine to machine communication via binary TCP/IP or SOAP. Edge IO is WiFi enabled edge device that accepts inputs in the form of RS-485, GPIO, USB, RS-232, USB, LAN, and WAN. Tulip apps can run on Edge IO, with the HMI in the form of a external touch screen monitor. Edge MC is also WiFi enabled, more affordable, but only has two USB ports.

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