Connecting Zigbee and BLE Devices to AWS IoT Platform using Gateway Solution

Follow the extensive HomeBridge^® getting started guide and videos on how to commission and connect the device into HomeBridge^®. We’ve set up this demo using the same documentation. If you need any further information or to update the firmware and configure the development environment for the gateway, kindly contact us.

To get started with AWS IoT, you need an AWS account. If you don’t have an AWS account, you can create one here.

Once you have created your account, you can log in and navigate to the AWS IoT Console.

Once you are on the AWS IoT Console page, make sure you have selected a region that is close to your location. We’ve selected the US East (N. Virginia) region as shown in the following screenshot:

• From the side menu, navigate to Manage | Things and you should see a screen as shown below
• Next, click on the Register a thing button and you should see a screen as shown here:
• Now, we are going to Add HomeBridge^® Gateway. So, click on Create a single thing
• On the next screen, we will start filling in the form by naming the device. I have called my device “Homebridge^®-Gateway”. You can give your Gateway any name, for example, “Kitchen-Gateway”; but do remember to update the code where applicable
• Next, we are going to apply a Type. Since this is our gateway device, we are going to create a new Type called “Gateway”. Click on Create a thing type and fill in the form as shown in the following screenshot:
• Next, we are going to add Gateway device to a group—a group of smart light nodes. You can group your devices as per your requirements and classification. You may group end nodes in motion sensor, door sensor, power sensor or other having similar attributes/properties
• Now, click on Create group and create it with the following values: We have added three attributes (status, color, brightness) to identify this group easily, as shown in the below screenshot
• Click on the Create thing group and this will create a new group—select that value as the default. These are the only Things we are going to set up in this step
• Now at the bottom of the page, click on the Next button

• Now that we have our Thing set up in AWS IoT, we are going to complete the remaining operation from Mobile Application to send data. The Basic steps for monitoring status and the controlling light bulb is shown in the getting started guide and video tutorial.
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• Open AWS IoT Thing page in the AWS Console and click on the Shadow tab, we should see the last record that we have sent update here:

  There are two approaches as to how you can get the shadow data:

  • Using the REST API: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/device-shadow-rest-api.html
  • Using MQTT-SNL: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/device-shadow-mqtt.html

  The above demo used the MQTT approach to fetch the shadow data.

Now, we need to create a certificate for the Thing. AWS uses certificate-based authentication and authorization to create a secure connection between the device and AWS IoT Core. Your screen should look as shown here:

• Under One-click certificate creation (recommended), click on the Create certificate button. This will create certificates as shown in the following screenshot. Do not share these certificates with anyone. These are as good as the username and password of your device to post data to AWS IoT
• Once the certificates are created, download the following:
  • Client certificate: [x].cert.pem
  • Public Key: [x].public.key
  • Private Key: [x].private.key
  • Root CA
• Once you have downloaded the keys, click on the Activate button
• Once the activation is successful, click on the Register Thing button and a new Thing named “Homebridge^®-Gateway” will be created. Click on “Homebridge^®-Gateway” and you should see something like this:
• Now, go to the main console and select the security tab as shown in below screen:
• Go back to the Things page, and from the side menu on this page, select Secure > Policies. Since we did not create any policies, we have filled up form as shown below. In this demo, we are allowing any kind of IoT operation to be performed by the device that uses this policy and on any resource. This is a dangerous setup, mainly for production; however, this is okay for learning purposes
• We are not done with the setup yet. We still need to attach Policy with a certificate to proceed. Navigate to Security | Certificates and, using the options available at the top-right of the certificate we created, we are going to attach the policy:
• Click on Attach policy on the previous screen and select the policy we have just created and Attach to complete the setup as the screen shown belowWith this, we are done with the setup of a Thing.