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First connection

This page is a quick brief on how to connect your first device to Connhex.

Prerequisites​

In order to complete this tutorial, we recommend a device capable of running Connhex Edge 1. If you don't have one available, you can still use a script that simulated a device as described below.

Enterprise plan

If you're running an Enterprise Connhex instance, just replace connhex.com with your domain.

First steps​

Let's start by registering a device: just pick a name and add the device serial number. If you're just exploring, just generate a demo ID: you'll still be able to connect an actual device in the next step.

Registering a device from the Connhex Dashboard.

Once your device has been registered, you have a couple of choices:

  • installing Connhex Edge on your physical device. See here for detailed instructions
  • download ´connhex_quickstart.py´, our example Python script to send messages from your local machine.
Using the quickstart script

Before using the quickstart script to test data upload to Connhex without a physical device, remember to install dependencies with pip install requests paho-mqtt. After doing this, you'll be able to run the script with python connhex_quickstart.py.

The rest of this tutorial assumes you have a device with Connhex Edge installed: if that's not the case, skip to the next section.

Interacting with the connectable​

We're ready to start playing 🎉

Download agent.env and put it in the /opt/connhex path of the device you have installed Connhex Edge on.

Then, on the Connhex Dashboard, head over to the device detail. You'll find a shell that automatically opens a connection to your edge: from here, you can try out a few commands.2 You can use the controls section to send a message to the connectable.

You can choose between JSON, SenML and a plain string. Don't waste too much time, though: the Connhex Edge Agent will receive your message, but there won't be any services ready to consume it. That's exactly what we're going to tackle next!

Where to go from here​

Let's summarize where we stand:

  • we've successfully installed and launched Connhex Edge
  • we have a working connection with the field, through the terminal

We have seen that, even though we can send commands from the cloud, the device isn't able to handle them. Moreover, the connectable is still mute: no data has been sent from the field.

To solve this, it's now time to write our first Connhex Edge service.

Footnotes​

  1. See minimum requirements here. ↩

  2. If you run out of ideas, look here! ↩