Send commands to your actuators through AskSensors

a) Create Actuator device

An Actuator device is a communication channel with unique Api Key through which users send commands from the AskSensors application to the physical device. Each Actuator device provides up to 6 Modules with shareable commands. Users can send commands to each module separately.
From your Actuator devices workspace, CLick ‘New Actuator’ to create a new Actuator device.

Fill your actuator name and description. Add your actuator modules and click on ‘Save’.

You will get the actuator informations:

– Actuator Name: The actuator name you have entered.
– Actuator ID: a unique actuator ID.
– Author: the actuator author.
– API Key Out: a unique key you will need to read command from this actuator.
– Created: date of creation
– Updated: date of last update
– Description: The Actuator description you have entered.

b) Edit Actuator

The Edit Actuator page provides users with several options:

– ‘Delete Actuator’ to delete the Actuator definitively.
– ‘Clear Actuator’ to delete all commands data stream storied in this actuator.
– ‘Disable Actuator’ to disable the actuator. No command will be stored on this actuator.
– ‘Generate Api Key Out’ to generate a new API KEY OUT for your actuator device.

c) Add Command

From your actuator device page, Click the ‘Modules’ tab, it contains serveral features:

• Add Command: Click ‘Add Command’ button to associate commands to your modules. There are 3 types of commands available: Slider, Switch and Value. From the Add Command window, Choose the command type and click ‘Save’.
  The image below shows an example of Slider Command.
• Export data: Click the ‘Export CSV’ button to export all the data stored in this module to a CSV file.

d) Set Command

To send a command to your device, select the command value (depending the command type: slider, switch or value) and click the button ‘Send command’. A list of guides are provided to describe how to read command values from AskSensors with ESP32, ESP8266 and Arduino Like-platforms. In addition, each AskSensors Command allows four main functionalities that are available through the four icons on the righ top of the Command, as shown in the next figure.

• Starting from the left, the ‘Share command’ icon generate a shareable URL that you can use to share your command with your friends and colleague, or embed it in your web application.
• Click ‘Edit command’ if you need to modify the command configuration.
• Click the ‘Open command icon, to view your command data stream in full screen.
• The remove icon hides the command from your actuator device page.

e) Actuator location

The AskSensors users have the possibility to set and visualize the GPS positions of their actuators.

• Click ‘Edit Actuator’ to go to the Actuator Location window.
• Enable ‘Show Actuator Location’.
• Set your actuator latitude and longitude in Decimal degree format (example: 48.855071, 2.350138).
• Click ‘Save actuator’.

A map view will be created showing your actuator GPS position.