Real-time edge-to-browser connectivity

Have you ever wanted to see the state of your remote devices in real time, without lag, spinners, or stale check-ins? Simple IoT now has real-time connectivity from edge to browser based on NATS, which is a high-performance, lightweight, open-source messaging system. This allows for rich, efficient interaction with remote devices, where remote state updates instantly and configuration changes take effect right away.

In the demo below, we have SIOT running on a Raspberry Pi 5 connected to another SIOT instance running on a cloud server.

The video demo walks through how this works.

A rule on the server watches a push button on the Pi 5 and then turns on an LED when the button is pressed. This demonstrates a round trip of data from the Pi 5 switch, to the server, through the rules, and then back to the Pi 5 LED. The LED lights nearly instantaneously when the button is pressed. The round trip is barely perceptible, roughly 100 ms.

If the connection drops, NATS JetStream queues data at both ends, and functionality resumes nearly instantly once the connection returns.

The NATS project is what makes this possible. NATS provides essential bits like JetStream that allows efficient synchronization between systems, and web client libraries that push data efficiently to the browser in real time.

SIOT models the entire system as a tree of nodes where each node is a set of points. Telemetry, IoT data, and configuration are all just points and are handled the same way. Write a point, and SIOT synchronizes it wherever it needs to go. This simplicity allows SIOT to efficiently synchronize data from a fleet of devices to your browser and makes it straightforward to extend with custom functionality for just about any application.