How to create a Connector for a device

How to create a Connector for a device

@Gabriel Lenz

This guide will help you create a new Connector for your own device that is not available in our list.


A Connector is a feature available at TagoIO to make it easier to manage devices payload parser and show your product to other developers.
By creating your connector, you will be able to update the payload parser for any device created using it, and you can also request it to be public for other developers to use.

Creating the Connector

To start, access this link https://admin.tago.io/connectors


Click on the “Create your own connector” button at the top right.

On the next page, you just have to click on the “Add connector” button located at the right top.
It will open a modal where you can choose the name and the network server that your connector will use.

Now, at the connector’s page, you need to enter a description and an image URL.
These are the recommended field properties for the connector:

  • Sensor name: Maximum of 36 characters.
  • Description: Maximum of 132 characters.
  • Logo URL: 150x60, PNG, or SVG with transparent background.

Documentation

Click on the documentation tab located at the top menu.
Here we entered more details about the sensor, explaining how it works, its features, and where to get more information about it.

In the Completion text and Device annotation, we added a dashboard template link, for the users that will install the device have some start point for their dashboards and visualize the data.

Device parameter

Click on the Device Parameter tab located at the top menu.


Device parameters are available to be used in the Payload Parser. In this specific case of the Touchtag sensor, it’s payload does not contain any battery information. We instead use the counter information of how much times it sent data to us, in order to calculate the battery. That said, we need the user to tells us which is the maximum time the sensor can send data before running out battery.


It also has a default value of 15000 uplinks, which is specified in the Touchtag datasheet.

You can notice that we put the Battery counter in the Advanced display location. Here is the TagoIO recommendation on the display location:


  • Main: The user must enter a value for the parameter in order for the device to work properly.
  • Advanced: The user may or may not enter the parameter in order for the device to work properly.
  • Hidden: A fixed parameter that you want to access in the parser, the user doesn’t have any access to the parameter.

Payload parser

Click on the Payload Parser located at the top menu.


The Touchtag is a special use case, where all the data is parsed on the Everynet network before sending it to the connector. But as we noticed earlier, it doesn’t send battery information, and we want to calculate this in the payload parser.

This is the place where you should insert the code that will decode the data received from your device to a TagoIO compatible format.


Click here to read the payload parser documentation. And Click here to go to the context variables documentation.


Note: The code should be written in JavaScript (NodeJS) and should not have more than 64kB. You already have some Payload Parser code samples to use as a starting point.

Then you just need to click on the Save button.


Now you can create your device using the new connector you’ve just created!