ThingsBoard Endpoint

Note:

This is not an official project of the ThingsBoard authors! Please refer to ThingsBoard - Open-source IoT Platform for official ThingsBoard projects!

The ThingsBoard Endpoint package adds a data Meta-Model to the ThingsBoard devices sending data over MQTT. This allows to provide a common data model for each device type.

The devices providing telemetry and attributes information to ThingsBoard are named Endpoints to remove confusion added when using names like clients or devices.

Endpoint Data Meta-Model

The object meta-structure is given as follows:

• An EndPoint can have Nodes
• Nodes can have Objects
• Objects can have Objects and/or Attributes

The Attribute objects represent the leafs in the data structure.

An Attribute is responsible to synchronise a variable or an attribute to the cloud. Depending on the write policy the attribute may be changed from the cloud in which case the attribute gets updated on the endpoint.

To set up your endpoint data model you should first think about how you would like to show up your IoT device in the cloud, keeping in mind the EndPoint->Node->Object->Attribute meta-structure implied.

We encourage you to provide the data model using an XML or JSON based file. The file needs then to be parsed and the Endpoint's object structure set up accordingly. There are Factory classes provided to simplify this process (XML only for the moment). The Factory class reads a data model file and creates the Endpoint object.