Sigfox Node.js Callback Demo

Purpose

• Logs the message sent by your Sigfox objects in an SQL database
• Display a table of received messages, with their unique id, data payload and relevant metadata

This is a Node.js + hapi application, with three routes:

• GET / to display the dashboard
• POST /uplink to log an uplink callback
• POST /downlink to log a downlink request, and send a reply back to the device

Installation

Dependencies

Before installing the app itself, check that the main dependencies are installed on your system

Node.js

To install, the better is probably to use nvm (Node version manager) that will let you switch between version of Node.

As of Nov 2017, the LTS version of Node.js is v8.2.1

PostgreSQL

Follow the instructions on the PostgreSQL website.

Environnment vars

Env vars

• DATABASE_URL : URL of the PostgreSQL database. Ex postgres://user:password@localhost/sigfox
• PORT: the port your app will be listening to. Defaults to 8000

Either set them in the env, or use a config.local.js file, that will be used to populate process.env

File structure: module.exports={ DATABASE_URL: 'postgres://user:password@localhost/sigfox' };

Install

$ npm install

A post install script will init a callbacks database

Test requests

Check your dashboard

Navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

Table will be empty by default

Uplink callback

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/uplink -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{"device":"1234", "data":"0", "station":"0001", "rssi":null, "duplicate":false}'

Downlink callback

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/downlink -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{"device":"1234", "data":"0", "station":"04E0", "rssi":-122, "duplicate":false}'

Callback setup on Sigfox Cloud

• Log into your Sigfox backend account
• In the device type section, access to the device type of the object you want to track
• In the sidebar, click on the Callbacks option
• Click the New button
• Choose "Custom callback"

Uplink

Set your callback as following

• Type: DATA UPLINK
• Channel: URL
• Url pattern : http://{your URL}/uplink
• HTTP method: POST
  • Content-Type : application/json
  • Body : {"device":"{device}", "data":"{data}", "station":"{station}", "rssi":"{rssi}", "duplicate":"{duplicate}"}
• Click OK

Downlink

Set your callback as following:

• Type: DATA BIDIR
• Channel: URL
• Url pattern : http://{your URL}/uplink
• HTTP method: POST
  • Content-Type : application/json
  • Body : {"device":"{device}", "data":"{data}", "station":"{station}", "rssi":"{rssi}", "duplicate":"{duplicate}"}
• Click OK

By default, new downlink callbacks are inactive.
You need to explicitly activate them, by clicking on the empty disc in the Downlink column

Once activated, your downlink callback will have a blue disk displayed in the Downlink column:

Easy deploy to Heroku

If you have an Heroku account, you can easily deploy this demo application online:

• Create a new application
• Attach a PostgreSQL addon. This will populate the DATABASE_URL env var, pointing to your new database
• Deploy the application & start it

	$ heroku apps:create
	$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
	$ git push heroku master
	$ heroku ps:scale web=1
	$ heroku open

Nota bene

This tutorial aims to help you discover the uplink and downlink capabilities.

Please, be aware messages will be duplicated in the PostgreSQL database as the message "data" is saved when both uplink and downlink callbacks are called.

You could only use the BIDIR callback which enables to:

• save the uplink frame in a database (using the "data" parameter containing the payload)
• send a downlink frame to a device by filtering the "ack" boolean parameter (which tells if the device is asking for one)