Work while having fun...with the ‘Internet of Things’, what can be better than that?

What can be better than working while having fun? What’s more exciting than learning and experimenting creatively without limits? 

Playing outside our primary domain, creates multiple possibilities that we couldn’t even imagine and opens the way to innovation. 

In the Rome Software Development Hub of HCL Products & Platforms, innovation is fostered and constantly pursued by giving people the opportunity to express their creativity.  In this blog, we want to show an example of this, by giving you a summary of what’s been happening recently around the Internet of Things. 

In the last years, the Internet of Things (IoT) experienced a sharp acceleration, and is definitely expected to shape the future of business. In this context, the Workload Automation team, a bunch of passionate, enthusiastic tech-lovers, decided to explore, learn, and experiment, around the Internet of Things. 

The adventure starts with the first meeting to define the project objectives. The team converges towards a unique idea: to build an IoT application for a meeting agenda based on Arduino programming, and, of course, orchestrated by Workload Scheduler.  

They outline the scenario to implement as their first approach to Arduino programming.  

When the meeting starts, according to the time set in the agenda, red lights automatically switch on outside the conference room, to show that the conference room is in use. 

When it is time for a break, a robot informs the meeting guests.

Finally, when the meeting is over, green lights outside the conference room inform colleagues that the conference room is available.

With this objective in mind, our friends start exploring how to control lights with Arduino. Then, they proceed assembling a small robot car: the most fun activity! The robot is given the name Nikola.

Now it is time to put all the pieces together and test the application. They decide to use the MQTT server supplied by the IoT platform on IBM Bluemix.

1. Nikola and the LED-light strip, subscribe to the respective queues on the MQTT server, to receive commands. 
   
2. Workload Scheduler runs a job stream on the Docker Agent on Bluemix that checks the Microsoft Outlook calendar every 5 minutes.  
   
3. When a meeting is scheduled for a set time in the booked conference room, the information about the meeting agenda is received by Workload Scheduler. 
4. When the meeting starts, Workload Scheduler, through the MQTT plug-in, publishes the command to switch on the red lights to the LED queue.   
5. The LED receives the command and the red lights are switched on. 
6. In the same way, when there is a scheduled break in the meeting agenda, Workload Scheduler publishes to Nikola’s queue the text of the message that Nikola must repeat.  
7. Nikola receives the text of the message.  
8. Then, Nikola invokes the Watson text-to-speech service on Bluemix that returns a .wav file. 
9. Nikola says: “Hi folks, it’s time for a break!” 

See this video for a complete representation of the story we have just told you.

After this deep dive into the Internet of Things, our friends are now ready to embark upon their next and exciting adventure. Stay tuned!

Marina Fabbri  
Senior Software Engineer 

Marina works as an Information Developer at HCL Technologies. In her role, she also creates marketing and how-to videos and contributes to social media for HCL Workload Automation.