BLOG

I have been experimenting a lot with Sigfox and I would like to help you find the resources you will need for your project.

Sigfox created this webpage for makers, It has some good resources and general information but I will break this out on the steps that you need to follow once you receive your Sigfox Module.

Each Sigfox module is identified by a ID and PAC that you will need when you register your devices with Sigfox on the Activation Portal.(You will need to extract the ID and PAC from your device. )

 Now that  you have your ID and PAC, you will need to create a user name on the Sigfox Backend when registering your device.

So now you should be setup to access the Sigfox Backend. On the Backend is where you are going to see the messages arriving from your devices. So whats next? well, the next step is to redirect the messages to your favorite cloud, we do this by setting up a Callback.

There are some preconfigured call backs for Amazon AWS you only need to follow this guide. For Microsoft Azure you could follow this guide along with the instructions on the backend(for me Azure was more complicated to setup).

And of course there is an option for Custom Callbacks, you can connect to any  cloud using them. Custom callbacks use HTTP methods like Put, Get and Post.

For the Custom callbacks you can use a cloud like Initial State(there are many others).  It is very simple:

Create a new Stream Bucket and copy the Endpoint URL
On the Sigfox backend create a Custom call back and paste the  Endpoint URL. The URL will look like this https://groker.initialstate.com/api/ events?accessKey="your key"&bucketKey="your bucket key". 

After adding your variables it will look like this: https://groker.initialstate.com/api/events?accessKey="your key"&bucketKey="your bucket key"&snr={snr}&rssi={rssi}&station={station}&Sequence={seqNumber}&Device={device} these are the available variables of the Sigfox network to monitor some signal parameters and also events.

After testing your Initial State Dashboard will look like this.