Is it possible for Arduino thing to communicate with Gateway without network connection?

WebThings
#1

Hi, I’m completely new to Webthings and I’ve just set up my first Gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.

I’ve got some Arduinos with a few different sensors, like temperature and light sensors. Do the Arduinos have to be connected to my local network in order to communicate with the Gateway? Is it possible to use Zigbee or Bluetooth to communicate with the Gateway instead?

I’m having trouble finding any Arduino thing examples that are not using the ESP8266 to connect with the Gateway.

Any help would be much appreciated!

#2

You can communicate over serial using https://github.com/mozilla-iot/serial-adapter but for bluetooth you’d either have to pretend to be an existing smart home device or implement your own adapter (which wouldn’t be too bad for bluetooth at least)

2 Likes
#3

Thank you, hobinjk, I did not know about the serial adapter :slight_smile:

Does anyone know where I can find examples of Things that are using Zigbee to communicate with the WebThings Gateway?

#4

Ian at oddWires made some nice examples:
https://docs.iot-bus.com/en/latest/mozilla-iot-examples/index.html

And built a 433MHz bridge via Arduino that can control commercial devices:

Maybe you can find a Zigbee library to support that radio protocol, in a fashion similar to the 433MHz radio examples.

I am a big fan of using the built-in Mozilla WebThings library in the MicroBlocks.fun IDE. But it doesn’t have a Zigbee radio block, only Wi-Fi and USB serial connectivity so far. (Maybe bridging via wired USB serial over the gateway Microblocks Add-on would work?) I’ll look into it…

1 Like
#5

What Zigbee devices or radios do you have/use?

#6

Thank you, kgiori! These look very interesting. It does seem that in all examples I will need at least one device, acting as a bridge, connected to the same network as the WebThings Gateway in order to receive data from devices that are not connected to the local network.

The devices I would like to use are Digi XBee3 ZigBee SMT Modules. What I would like to do is have sensors connected to those modules and send the values to the WebThings Gateway using Zigbee.

#7

If @dhylands had endless time, I’m sure he could put together a bunch of useful Zigbee examples for a bridge approach… He wrote and maintains the Zigbee Add-on for the WebThings Gateway. What Zigbee software library do you use?

#8

Perhaps the Zigbee Add-on is what I should be looking into to get a better understanding of how the WebThings Gateway works with Zigbee.

I haven’t started setting up the Zigbee devices yet, I’m just curious to see if there is a way to have them communicate directly with the WebThings Gateway without attaching them to the same local network.

Thank you for the help so far, I’ve got some reading to do now :nerd_face: