Use Digital Matter with AllThingsTalk

This article explains how you can setup your Digital Matter devices to act as gateways and forward the data coming from nearby BLE tag devices.

Usage

In order to use your BLE Tags with your Digital Matter device on ALSO IoT Platform, you’ll first need to configure your Digital Matter device to scan for your type of BLE Tag. You’ll do this over OEMServer.

Digital Matter OEM Server Configuration

• In the devices list, select your Digital Matter device that you wish to scan BLE Tags with
• Click Parameters > Edit System Parameters
• Click + Add Parameters button and select BLE Tag Scanning
• Now, in the new BLE Tag Scanning tab, configure the following:
• Set “Scan On Trip Start” to Yes
• Set “Scan On Trip End” to Yes
• Set “In-Trip Scan Period (seconds)” to 600
• Set “Upload On In-Trip Scan” to Yes
• Set “Out of Trip Scan Period (minutes)” to 20
• Set “Upload On Out Of Trip Scan” to Yes
• Set “Scan Length (seconds)” to 15
• If you’re using an iBeacon or Eddystone tag, you can enable scanning for them by setting Enable iBeacon Tags and Enable Eddystone Tags to Yes respectively
• Open the dropdown list in any of the Other Tag Type *X* and select your BLE Tag manufacturer. You can easily set your Digital Matter device to scan for multiple tag types (manufacturers) by opening other Other Tag Type *X* dropdowns and selecting additional tag types.
• Save the configuration by clicking Update in the bottom right corner.

Your Digital Matter device will receive the new configuration the next time it reports its data, which shouldn’t be long.

ALSO IoT Platform Configuration

Once your Digital Matter device is confgured to scan for BLE Tags, it’s time to add your tags to your ground on ALSO IoT Platform.

• Go to your ALSO IoT Platform ground
• Click + New Device
• Select your BLE Tag from the catalog
• Once it is added, open the device from the device list
• Go to Device Settings (upper right corner) and open General
• You’ll see a field Hardware Unique ID - you need to input the unique identifier of your BLE Tag here. In most cases, it’s the MAC address, but make sure to write it without colons (e.g. “0F8813A47FB1“)
• Save by clicking Save and you’re done

Next time your Digital Matter device scans for BLE Tags, your BLE Tag device on ALSO IoT Platform will be updated to show all of its sensor data.

BLE Tag Specific Information

ELA (All Tags)

• ELA Tags need to be configured to enable “Manufacturer Mode”, otherwise Digital Matter devices won’t see them. To configure the tags, check Digital Matter’s Documentation (under “ELA Tag Configuration”)
• To find the MAC address of your ELA tag (its unique identifier on the platform), you’ll need to use the ELA Android app. iOS is more tricky because of Apple’s API limitations.

Tag Types

When a payload containing bluetooth tag data arrives from a Digital Matter device, it contains a tt (Tag Type) field, which tells us which tag it is.
You can find the list of all possible tag types, provided by Digital Matter in our Device types GitHub repo.