Required Fields for WiFi Location Service in Nordic Cloud Service

[eric_dropwireless]

Hi,

Our team is interested in WiFi location service in Cloud Services.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Cloud-services/Location-Services

However, under the WiFi section, I see the example request contains { MAC address, SSID, signal strength, frequency }, and I wonder if all 4 are strictly required.

Since our IoT applications are extremely restricted to the packet size, they can only afford 6-Byte MAC address and 1 Byte of signal strength.

Is it possible to use WiFi location service with MAC address and signal strength?

Best regards,
Eric

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

 

You can choose which part to send, with these kconfig options:

https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/blob/v2.9-branch/subsys/net/lib/nrf_cloud/Kconfig.nrf_cloud_location#L40-L43

 

But, please note:

The data sent needs to conform to the API that is expected to be received, based on which transport protocol (HTTP, CoAP, MQTT) that you use.

See here: https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/nrf-cloud/page/APIs/APIOverview.html

As an example, you can see here for mqtt: https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/nrf-cloud/page/APIs/MQTT/Topics.html#subscribe-topics-c2d-for-location-services

 

Kind regards,

Håkon

[eric_dropwireless]

Hi Håkon,

That's great!

I have one more question.

Since our devices are not directly connected to the IP (most of them are based on nRF52840), we usually use a cloud server or phones connected over BLE to request REST API on the behalf of the devices.

For example, when an end device scans the WiFi APs nearby, it will send the data to our server via LoRa, and the server will make actual request over MQTT.

Are these cases counted as Cloud-to-Cloud in nRF Cloud protocol model? Or is it possible that the server or other proxy picks MQTT topic with the end device's ID and pretend as the end device?

Thank you,
Eric

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi Eric,

 

eric_dropwireless said:

Since our devices are not directly connected to the IP (most of them are based on nRF52840), we usually use a cloud server or phones connected over BLE to request REST API on the behalf of the devices.

For example, when an end device scans the WiFi APs nearby, it will send the data to our server via LoRa, and the server will make actual request over MQTT.

Are these cases counted as Cloud-to-Cloud in nRF Cloud protocol model? Or is it possible that the server or other proxy picks MQTT topic with the end device's ID and pretend as the end device?

Any device that has the correct credentials can connect.

Cloud-to-cloud is more if you have your own backend, where you want to use a specific function from us;

for instance location based services, where you only want to connect this through your own solution.

See here for more details: https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/nrf-cloud/page/Devices/MessagesAndAlerts/SetupMessageBridge.html

 

Kind regards,

Håkon

[eric_dropwireless]

Got it, thanks for the information.

I will deliver this to our team.

Thank you,
Eric