Input Connectors, or Incons for short, are any external devices, applications,
web APIs, services, or platforms that send data to RLD One or make data available
for use in your RLD One project.
IoT Sensor Telemetry
You have an IoT sensor sitting somewhere collecting data, and every
second you have it send data to your RLD One project.
Connect to Message Broker
You have a message broker, like AWS SQS or Ably, that is handling
sending messages throughout your business, and you configure it to
send data to RLD One
Data Historian with MQTT
You have an MQTT Broker like HiveMQ
or AWS IoT Core handling brokering data
for your MQTT enabled devices and applications. You configure it to
send data to RLD One so it can act as a historian for your MQTT devices.
Vehicle Telemetry
You have a handful of vehicles with telemetry devices and sensors
on board and you set them up to send data to RLD One so you can track
them and get notified when they are somewhere they aren't supposed to be.
What follows are the types of Input Connectors and what you will
need in order to configure them appropriately.
RLD can subscribe to an MQTT broker like HiveMQ, EMQX, AWS, and more to receive data on specified topics whenever the broker receives data on that topic.
To learn more about MQTT see the following Article by EMQ
This is the URL for the broker that we are connecting to.
This is the topic that your Output Connector will publish to, allowing the broker to send data to any subscribed clients on that same topic.
Tags
This can be used to securely identify data from RLD to your MQTT broker. These can be:
Basic Authentication: username and password
Certificate and private key authentication
The option you use is usually dictated by the broker provider you are using. If you are using a free public broker, you usually don't need any form of authentication.
Both of these creds can be created in the "Credentials" tab.
This is the public certificate for the MQTT broker you are connecting to. This is often only used on brokers that require authentication via public + private keys, but heavily depends on your broker.
See the following RLD Wiki articles for examples of how to connect to MQTT brokers
You can set up a custom Webhook (aka API endpoint) in your RLD project that can receive data in many different formats.
To learn more about HTTP endpoints see the following article
This is the URL that is assigned to this endpoint based on all of the options you have selected. This URL is made up of a few notable things:
These are the options that influence the Assigned URL
Auto
Use this if you don't know what you're doing.
The "Auto" option will automatically generate an endpoint for you. This endpoint is meant to be long and difficult to guess in order to protect your Output Connector and project data.
Endpoint
Use this if you know what you're doing.
The "Endpoint" option allows you to specify your own endpoint. For example if you enter "test" as the endpoint the url will be something like "https://oc.reallifedata.net/32/oc/test", however it will be specific to your RLD project.
All Incon Endpoints in a project MUST BE UNIQUE, you cannot make multiple Incon endpoints with the same name in a single project.
If you use this option, you will have to select a username + password credential to protect the endpoint from spam. To then authenticate you will have to make HTTP GET requests using Basic Auth in conjunction with the username + password you configured.
See the following RLD wiki articles for examples of how to set up an HTTP Receive endpoint with RLD One that receives data from the respective source
Wiki