Two-way remote control patterns

Notehub.io
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We have an existing fleet connected to AWS IoT (MQTT) with very low bandwidth requirements. Devices have a remote-control element and currently subscribe to topics to receive commands. Blues looks interesting, but I’m trying to figure out if your services will fit our two-way communication needs and how tough the migration might be.

To transition to something like Blues Wireless (specifically NB-IoT notecards), am I correct in assuming that your Notehub routes only forward one-way, so our devices could no longer subscribe to topics?

We would, instead, have to build an alternative service to send commands to each device via the Notehub API, right? …something like Adding Notes in the Notehub API w/ note.get in the Notecard API? Unless here’s some way to route MQTT messages as notes?

Curious if there are documented patterns I’m missing for more active two-way, remote-control patterns/architectures (preferably w/ note-python). I’m only finding one-way examples so far.

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Hey @jamstooks,

Welcome to the Blues community! (And sorry for the late response here.)

To transition to something like Blues Wireless (specifically NB-IoT notecards), am I correct in assuming that your Notehub routes only forward one-way, so our devices could no longer subscribe to topics?

Correct.

We would, instead, have to build an alternative service to send commands to each device via the Notehub API, right? …something like Adding Notes in the Notehub API w/ note.get in the Notecard API?

Correct. If you wanted to reuse some of your existing infrastructure, you could probably build a middle layer in the cloud that subscribes to MQTT topics and then uses the Notehub API to add Notes—but one way or another you need to add Notes or send signals to get data from Notehub to Notecards.

Curious if there are documented patterns I’m missing for more active two-way, remote-control patterns/architectures (preferably w/ note-python). I’m only finding one-way examples so far.

We have a guide that shows an approach to two-way remote control, although it uses Arduino code and not note-python: Remote Command and Control - Blues Developers. If you have any questions that guide doesn’t answer let me know because it sounds like you have the exact use case that guide tries to address.

Thanks,
TJ

1 Like
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Thanks, @tjvantoll! This is very helpful. I’ll dive in a bit deeper with these resources.