Introduction
Welcome to the IoT.nxt® Community. On this site you can find documentation related to our core products. The IoT.nxt platform is technology agnostic, which allows it to overcome the challenge of creating a completely interconnected, interoperable value chain in any industry.
Through our dedicated engineering and support teams, we enable the deployment and running of the best breed of technologies. We can integrate with any systems and devices deployed, creating a holistic business ecosystem that you can monitor and manage remotely from a single screen.
The IoT.nxt Community Pages is your portal to better understand and implement the Commander™ platform, or components thereof. We’ve compiled the latest information, tips and tricks, and code samples to help you navigate our platforms, products, and services with ease.
The IoT.nxt platform
The innovative IoT.nxt stack can efficiently collect data across multiple devices, then streamline and stage or store that data in a user-friendly format to give you deep insights into your entire business operation.
Connecting a device and building your own solution starts with our Certified Device Catalogue. This is where you can see which hardware has been tested and certified for use with the Commander Platform via the Raptor™ Gateways.
With your certified hardware selected, you can now connect to one of the Raptor products. Depending on the solution you require, the device(s) could be connected physically to the Edge Raptor, which is a software edge gateway, or the Micro Raptor, a hardware and firmware driven product. You can also connect directly to the Virtual Raptor, a cloud driven edge device, via authenticated drivers.
No matter what you are monitoring or controlling, the Raptor is capable of abstracting data from any device and sending the normalised data to the Commander layer. Once the data is ingested you have the entire Commander Platform at your disposal to action, report on, or manage your data. From here, logic can be added, dashboards can be built with a few clicks, and users can be managed to meet most solution specifications.
The Commander platform also links with the Virtual Raptor to provide bulk management of gateways and connected devices. The Commander platform then provides real-time visualisation and management of your desired use cases and applications.
To enable powerful artificial intelligence at the edge, your data could also be ingested by the Navigator platform which offers data storage, quality checks, and BI reporting.
With the Commander Platform, the only limitation is your own imagination.
Note: Should a device not be supported on our Device Catalogue, there are various avenues available to develop new drivers or integrations with the Commander Platform. This can be done by your in-house developers or via a formal request to your IoT.nxt representative. All external development will go through an IoT.nxt verification process.
The following layers make up our award-winning stack.
Raptor Edge Gateways
The Raptor family of products include Micro Raptor, Edge Raptor, Virtual Raptor (or V-Raptor), and Sonar. The Raptor product range is designed to digitise your endpoints, no matter the application you require. With the innovative Raptor toolset, you will be able to connect any system or endpoint in your origination to a single platform. This allows you to control, measure, or manage any device or system.
The Micro Raptor is a small battery-operated edge gateway for single-purpose measurements or actuation.
The Edge Raptor is an industrial multi-purpose edge gateway capable of digitising any service, system, or sensor.
The Virtual Raptor is a cloud/IP-based multi-purpose gateway used for integration and bulk gateway applications and device management.
Equipped with the ability to connect to most systems in the IoT ecosystem, the Raptor family of products can assume the properties and protocols required to communicate with any device or sensor. The data that is gathered by Raptor and is ingested by Commander, from where it is normalised and augmented to provide you with a plethora of applications to visualise data through web and mobile dashboards.
Raptor filters, aggregates, normalises, and abstracts the data required to facilitate and manage business processes. By managing data at the edge and only allowing the relevant data to flow through the stack, Raptor solves the problem of big data overload. This method of data orchestration makes it possible to overcome challenges that typically arise from poor coordination across value chains, breaking down organisational silos, and empowering various teams to utilise data from the edge.
Raptor is used to integrate all devices that make up the device layer. This integration gives these devices a level of intelligence, which allows for bi-directional communication not only between devices but also up and down the Commander-Raptor stack, creating a smart IoT ecosystem.
The Commander Application Enablement Platform
Commander is an application enablement platform that enables the visualisation and control of telemetry data across the entire platform. The platform’s single-user interface allows your business to input all its proprietary business processes and automate decision-making.
Commander is cloud-agnostic and can be hosted in multiple cloud environments and utilises a containerised microservice architecture running on Kubernetes. The Commander platform has two deployment models to cater for big and small implementations. A tenant can be deployed per customer with dedicated resources in an isolated environment or an account can be created on a shared tenant to reduce costs, as resources are shared by the different accounts.
Commander includes multiple applications and is used to create and link endpoints to edge devices as well as to setup functions, triggers, and alarms based on the endpoints values. From the Account management app users can manage their account and user access. Commander also gives you the ability to build your own dashboards so that you can monitor your devices, your way.
To further enhance the IoT.nxt technology stack, the Product store app can be used to manage device and product templates for easy deployment when you need it.
You can think of the Dashboard and Raptor apps as the visualisation of entity values. This platform is fully customisable to give your organisation and its users all the tools they need, on one platform.
Data and Analytics
Navigator is a data and analytics platform that is built to unify data, analytics, and AI workloads. We built Navigator to ingest any type of data, from any source, allowing you to create analytics solutions using AI and Machine Learning, build BI reports, and visualise data.
Navigator also addresses another major issue, managing your data storage. With IoT.nxt you’ll never need to worry about how your data is looked after. Navigator will manage your data lifecycle end-to-end, to drive more value for your business.
With efficient, real-time, and long-term data storage using the IoT.nxt Data Lake, your data is left raw until it is needed, providing you with the most economical way to manage multitudes of data. Navigator will transform and process data efficiently, for downstream use, no matter the application. There are two storage options within Navigator: efficient long-term storage in the data lake or flexible storage suited for analytics purposes in the data warehouse. Both storage options make use of advanced strategies, such as time-based partitioning or time-series indexing, to improve query performance and cost.
