Welcome to the Dust Academy!

This material will walk you through SmartMesh IP, teach you what you can do with it and how to use it. The material is presented as a series of labs with questions.

These labs are regularly used as a hands-on addition to undergraduate and graduates courses on Internet of Things, or as stand-alone tutorials at conference, tradeshows or summer schools. All the material presented on this site is published under the same BSD open-source license as the source code, meaning that you are free to use all or part of it. If you do, we would appreciate if you could drop us a line at dustsupport@linear.com.

Are you an instructor?

If you are an instructor and want to use this material in your labs, let us know. There are pages visible only to instructors and which contain tips, as well as the answer to all questions. Drop us a line at dustsupport@linear.com so we can give your the right credentials to access that supplementary material.

NEW! Half-Day Unplugfest

We are introducing the Dust Academy material as a Half-Day Unplugfest in which you will be building smaller and larger networks, connect to the IBM Watson IoT Platform, and interact with the motes and platform. Oh, my!

Before you begin

Before you begin, make sure you have:

a computer with Internet access
a DC9000B SmartMesh IP Starter Kit
- 1x DC2274 SmartMesh IP Manager
- 5x DC9003A-B SmartMesh IP Motes
- 1x DC9006A Eterna Interface Card
- 2x Micro USB cables

During the labs, you will use this kit to create a wireless network, interact with the mote and manager over their Command Line Interface (CLI) and Application Programming Interface (API), connect external sensor and actuators, integrate your SmartMesh network into the Internet, etc.

All labs

Lab 00. Things to Install
Lab 01. Your First Network
Lab 02. Navigating the Documentation
Lab 03. Starter Kit Introduction Video
Lab 04. Motes, managers and LEDs
Lab 05. Serial Port Madness
Lab 06. Network Identifier
Lab 07. Ping your Motes
Lab 08. Manager Statistics
Lab 09. Join duty cycle — 30 min
Lab 10. Performance estimator
Lab 11. See The Mesh
Lab 12. Running JsonServer+Node-RED
Lab 13. Observe Networks Events
Lab 14. Receive Health Reports
Lab 15. receive temperature
Lab 16. raw OAP temperature notifications — 15 min
Lab 17. Control an LED and a buzzer
Lab 18. raw OAP LED commands — 20 min
Lab 19. A Simple OAP Node-RED Flow — 30 min
Lab 20. OAP pkgen — 15 min
Lab 21. Exploring the serial API — 30 min
Lab 22. OAP GPIO get — 20 min
Lab 23. Detect GPIO changes
Lab 24. A Building Monitoring Solution — 60 min
Lab 25. Switch to slave mode — 10 min
Lab 26. Slave serial API — 10 min
Lab 27. Searching for networks — 15 min
Lab 28. Backbone mode — 40 min
Lab 29. DustLink — 60 min
Lab 30. Publish to Clouddata — 10 min
Lab 31. Crash-course on MQTT
Lab 32. Publish/Subcribe with MQTT
Lab 33. MQTT Control Loop
Lab 34. A Canopy Network Coordinated over MQTT — 20 min
Lab 35. Starting Node-RED on IBM Cloud — 10 min
Lab 36. Registering to all events — 10 min
Lab 38. Installing Node-RED dashboard
Lab 39. Dashboard: temperature
Lab 40. Dashboard: LED
Lab 41. Dashboard: buzzer
Lab 42. Dashboard: reed switch — 20 min
Lab 43. Dashboard: analog input — 20 min
Lab 44. Half-Day Unplugfest!
- Part 0a: Things to prepare before the session — Things to install on your computer and on your IBM Cloud instance before coming to the session.
- Part 0b: Getting Started! — Overview of the hardware you will be using, and of the general organization of the unplugfest.
- Part 1: Your First Standalone Network — Build your very first network, understand how the LEDs indicate the state of the motes, issue simple CLI commands on the manager, understand the use of the netid.
- Part 3: A Canopy Network Coordinated through IBM Watson IoT — How the canopy network, which is already deployed in your building works.
- Part 2: Understanding Trade-Offs in SmartMesh IP — Understand how latency, data rate and energy trade off for one another.
- Part 4: Interact with Sensors and Actuators — Connect sensors and actuators to your mote, and interact with them from your Node-RED instance in the IBM Cloud!
- Part 5: Programming Challenge — Once you have completed Part 4, sky is the limit. Explore a couple of possibilities where to go from there.
Lab 45: Ring of Things
retired
- Lab 11. OAP GPIO set [1/2] — 30 min
- Lab 15. Subscribe to notifications — 5 min
- Lab 31. JsonServer+Node-RED — 60 min
- Lab 37. Receiving temperature data — 10 min
Instructors Requirements

Per-label labs

Each lab is labeled as either "basic", "master mode", "slave mode", "Internet" or "advanced".

"basic" labs

Start by following these labs first, in the order below. Then, pick one or more of the other categories of labs.

per-requisite: None.

Page:

Lab 00. Things to Install
Page:

Lab 01. Your First Network
Page:

Lab 02. Navigating the Documentation
Page:

Lab 03. Starter Kit Introduction Video
Page:

Lab 04. Motes, managers and LEDs
Page:

Lab 05. Serial Port Madness
Page:

Lab 06. Network Identifier
Page:

Lab 07. Ping your Motes
Page:

Lab 09. Join duty cycle — 30 min
Page:

Lab 12. Running JsonServer+Node-RED
Page:

Lab 13. Observe Networks Events
Page:

Lab 21. Exploring the serial API — 30 min

"master mode" labs

Follow these labs to learn about the motes running in "Master" mode, i.e. without external micro-controller. Go through the labs in the order below.

per-requisite: all "basic" labs.

Labs which relate to the motes running in "Master" mode, . The expected completion time for each lab is displayed on the right.

Page:

Lab 15. receive temperature
Page:

Lab 16. raw OAP temperature notifications — 15 min
Page:

Lab 17. Control an LED and a buzzer
Page:

Lab 18. raw OAP LED commands — 20 min
Page:

Lab 20. OAP pkgen — 15 min
Page:

Lab 22. OAP GPIO get — 20 min
Page:

Lab 23. Detect GPIO changes

"slave mode" labs

Follow these labs to learn about the motes running in "Slave" mode, i.e. with an external micro-controller driving it. Go through the labs in the order below.

per-requisite: all "basic" labs.

Page:

Lab 25. Switch to slave mode — 10 min
Page:

Lab 26. Slave serial API — 10 min
Page:

Lab 27. Searching for networks — 15 min

"internet" labs

Follow these labs to learn how to integrate a SmartMesh IP network into the Internet. Go through the labs in the order below.

per-requisite: all "basic" labs.

Page:

Lab 24. A Building Monitoring Solution — 60 min
Page:

Lab 29. DustLink — 60 min
Page:

Lab 30. Publish to Clouddata — 10 min
Page:

Lab 33. MQTT Control Loop

"advanced" labs

Follow these labs to learn about miscellaneous advanced SmartMesh IP features. Go through the labs in any order.

per-requisite: all "basic" labs.

How to read this material

We recommend you go through the "basic" labs first, then pick one of more other categories of labs.

If you want to do everything, just follow the labs in order.

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