It is increasingly common for connected projects to use geolocation elements, either to monitor the location of mobile assets such as vehicle fleets or livestock, or just in their graphical interface to help identify different devices through maps, as these visualizations offer an easy way to identify devices in a given network based on their position.

There are many software technologies that allow taking advantage (improve) the geolocation capacities of any project, both when visualizing the data and to program automatisms that keep the resources under surveillance in an automatic way and in real time, by means of geofences. After analyzing the needs of our users in relation to geolocation, we have made a review of the capabilities of the platform including some of them, that can be used with any kind of device such as Sigfox, LoRaWAN (also with TheThingsNetwork devices) or even with HTTP integration.

Geofencing Support for IoT Projects

Geofencing is a technique that allows defining a virtual perimeter over geographical areas, it can be defined as a radius around a point or tracing polygons and monitor the relative position of the devices and those areas in order to trigger entering or leaving events and define custom behaviors.

The geofencing service of Thinger.io has been associated with devices (or groups of devices) allowing a simple configuration as you can see below in the next example. It is just required to create a device (for the example we will do it with a HTTP device that we will call with a callback) and access the “geofence” tab of the device dashboard, where we can activate the edit panel to draw one or more areas to be evaluated.

For each area we can establish a behavior either when entering, leaving or when the device remains in a state, being able to select as a result an endpoint, which is also a very versatile tool of the platform with which we can send emails or HTTP request to any other service, even execute actions on the platform itself.

We can execute an example by calling the callback of this device sending the variables a longitude and a latitude, as in sample body included in the callback overview. These parameters will be used by the server to make the comparison.

This functionality can also be applied to sets of devices, making use of the Asset Manager. As always, you can find a more detailed description of these features in the Thinger.io documentation/geofences or look for help in the community discussion forum.

Improved Google Maps Widget

The basic integration supported so far only allowed to view the location in real-time, or define fixed positions, but now it is possible to display the track route and custom waypoints, and also define additional configurations as default zoom level, map type or path color. An interesting addition to any display dashboard.

All these options are easily configurable in the widget creation form. As always we have tried to maintain an easy and fast interface when applying modifications on the platform.

All these new features have been included in Thinger.io revision 2.9.4, which is available for both community users and professional instances. And they are not the only ones, since this release comes loaded with new features specially oriented to project scalability, with tools to group resources and better manage projects, but we will talk about this in the next post, dedicated specifically to Thinger.io’s professional features.

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