The Kio Cloud platform is the backbone of our solutions and offerings. It's open and flexible, allowing you to integrate with the platform data to build custom solutions unique to your requirements by using our APIs and SDKs alongside our IoT devices.
In this article, we'll provide an overview of our Kio Cloud data that’s available to you from our APIs and SDKs, and explain how the data can be seamlessly integrated with your tracking, occupancy, environmental monitoring, and indoor wayfinding solutions.
Before you begin to explore how you can integrate with our APIs and SDKs, it’s important to understand the Kio Cloud platform and its key components.
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IoT Devices.
Tags. The moving devices that are either attached to an asset or worn by people.
Infrastructure. The stationary devices designed to remain in a fixed position. Room Sensors are either mounted to a wall or ceiling. The BLE to WiFi Gateways are the devices that receive BLE data and send data to Kio Cloud over the local Wi-Fi network.
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Kio Setup Manager mobile app. For onsite deployment and installation of Infrastructure devices. Available for both iOS and Android mobile devices.
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Kio Cloud web interface.
Smart Location. It's a digital map of the physical indoor environment - where you'll manage the location topology and view real-time data of your IoT devices. Learn more about the power of rooms.
Device Management. It’s where you can manage and monitor devices.
Device Health. It’s where you can set Alert Rules to get notified when a device needs attention. Alert types available include when Portal Lights are offline, when Kio Cloud has not received data from deployed tags and rooms sensors, to device low battery levels.
Policy Foundry. It’s where you can set policies for device conditions that trigger actions when a condition is met. Conditions include device button press events, occupancy thresholds, to device health conditions. An action can be set to send email or text messages or as an event to an AWS Kinesis or Azure Event Hub stream.
Users. It’s where you can manage user access and permissions to your Kio Cloud account. And where to get your API key that’s required to authenticate with our APIs and SDKs.
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Kio Cloud APIs & Mobile SDKs. This is what you use to integrate the real-time and historical data from Kontakt.io IoT devices, and manage and monitor devices. It's no secret, but we build our Kio Cloud apps using our own APIs.
Once you set up your Kio Cloud Smart Location and deploy and install the Infrastructure devices, you can start exploring your Kontakt.i IoT device data and begin integrating with our APIs and SDKs.
The Kio Cloud APIs and SDKs provide real-time and historical data from your Kontakt.io IoT devices, as well as device management, monitoring, and integration capabilities.
Our REST APIs are ideal for control plane operations, such as managing devices and the location topology. Meanwhile, the Streams API is better suited for consuming the data for fast mutating data plane operations requiring real-time processing and updating of data. If you need to track assets in real-time or receive real-time sensor data, the Streams API is the appropriate choice.
This API is where you can configure, monitor, and manage your Kontakt.io IoT devices in Kio Cloud.
What you can do with the Device Management API:
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Configure devices and monitor their status
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Get device firmware configurations
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Get device Eddystone and iBeacon BLE connectivity configurations
Use cases: tracking, occupancy, environmental monitoring
This REST API delivers real-time and historical data for your IoT devices and the occupancy data measured by room sensors (Portal Beams), and the Kio Cloud location topology.
What you can do with the Location & Occupancy API:
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Get the occupancy, telemetry, and position data for tags and room sensors.
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Get the physical mapped location topology (Kio Cloud Smart Location); campuses, buildings, floors, rooms, and footfall spaces.
Use cases: tracking, occupancy, environmental monitoring
The Location & Occupancy Streams API delivers real-time data for occupancy, telemetry, and positions, by streaming event data to a client channel, that being either AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hub, or IBM Watson.
This API uses WebSockets to enable bidirectional communication between clients and servers, allowing the API to push Kio Cloud event data to the client channel as it becomes available.
Stream event subscriptions include:
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Occupancy. Get the real-time occupancy data measured by room sensors like the Kontakt.io Portal Beam.
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Telemetry. Get the real-time environmental telemetry data, including ambient air temperature, humidity levels, motion, to light levels for tags and room sensors.
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Position. Get the real-time position data for tags for indoor tracking solutions.
Use cases: indoor wayfinding and proximity location-based solutions, device monitoring and management
Our Mobile SDKs (Software Development Kits) provide developers with pre-built components that can be integrated into iOS and Android apps built on top of the Kio Cloud platform data. The SDKs come with tools, libraries, documentation, and both sample references and apps.
Our Developer Center is where developers can find everything they need in one place and is dedicated to creators who want to bring the Internet of Things to their apps.
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For our REST APIs, our user-friendly interface displays endpoints, methods, parameters, and response codes, along with a Try it now feature.
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For our Streams API, it’s a two-step process to get up and running allowing for a seamless real-time integration.
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For our SDKs, we provide SDK references and sample apps for ease of use, faster development, and consistency across different projects
If you're looking to create custom IoT solutions, Kontakt.io's Kio Cloud platform and IoT devices are the perfect place to start. With an open and flexible architecture, the Kio Cloud platform allows you to seamlessly integrate real-time data with your own tracking, occupancy, environmental monitoring, and indoor wayfinding solutions. With our APIs and SDKs, Kontakt.io makes it easy to build custom solutions tailored to your specific needs.