nrf9160 as ble lte gateway with private mqtt server and bi-directional communication

[terence_liew]

Hi,

I am planning to buy a nrf9160-DK to build a BLE LTE-M gateway. I would like to ask if the gateway is able to communicate with a private MQTT broker/server instead of nrf Cloud using LTE-M (of course the MQTT broker of my private server will be made accesible to the intenet)? If yes, can you point me to useful documents , samples or tutorials able to do that?

To give you a clearer picture of what I am trying to do, I have a BLE module (BT840) connected to a sensor. I would like to send data of the sensor via BLE from the BT840 to nrf9160 which acts as a gateway and send the data via LTE-M to a private server with MQTT broker installed in it . I would also like to send command to the sensor via the nrf9160 from the private server too by initiating the command from an MQTT websocket client connected to the MQTT broker of my private server. Therefore, the gateway communication has to be bi-directional. Is nrf9160 able to complete this task?

I've looked into this inquiry (https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/51234/lte-ble-gateway), but I am still confused of how we can implement the firmwares at the nrf9160-DK side (nrf52840 and nrf9160) to accomplish what i described previously and also how we can use a private mqtt server to do that without the nrfcloud API? 

Best regards,

Terence

[Hakon]

Hello,

 

If yes, can you point me to useful documents , samples or tutorials able to do that?

It depends what kind of cloud backend you are using for your endpoint. If you are using AWS or Azure, there are dedicated samples for that in the SDK. Here are some links;

https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/tree/master/samples/nrf9160/aws_iot

https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/tree/master/samples/nrf9160/azure_iot_hub

https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/tree/master/samples/nrf9160/cloud_client

If you want to host the broker yourself without using any of those services, you can change CONFIG_NRF_CLOUD_HOST_NAME to use a custom endpoint instead and change CONFIG_NRF_CLOUD_SEC_TAG to point to your own certificates. If you want to read more about it, there is some information here.