Internet of Things made simpler with SAP API Management

In this series of blog, I am going to share my experience using the HANA Cloud Platform’s Internet of Things service and also show how one could leverage the IoT APIs and securely expose them using API Management to complete an E2E business scenario. I was motivated to do a prototype as a result of a discussion with one of our customers who are leaders in rail freight. They were keen to understand how they could use HCP to provide a solution to their partners who could monitor rail wagons in real-time based on the sensor data captured from devices installed in each wagon.

I started the PoC with a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a tiny and affordable computer that you can use to learn programming through fun and practical projects. As you can see from the below image, it’s a mini computer and it has most of the basic things.

There are few other devices like Arduino & ESP8266 which are even smaller and very well suit IoT projects. Since this was my first ever attempt, I decided to stick with Raspberry PI as it comes with features like inbuilt wifi/Bluetooth and is recommended for beginners. Next, I purchased the below sensors

1)Basic photocell resistor which changes resistance based on how bright the light is. I followed this tutorialon adafruit to implement the photocell resistor.

2) Digital temperature sensor which measures the current temperature. I followed this tutorial onadafruitto implement the Digital temperature sensor

One of the mistakes I did earlier was to buy an analog sensor TMP36 to only find that Raspberry PI supports only sensors which give digital output. You would need MCP3008to convert analog to digital inputs for such sensors.