Recipe Overview

This recipe (link tbd) includes detailed steps to locate Watson IoT devices using Wi-Fi scans. The recipe includes steps and an example of how to locate a Raspberry PI device. Similar steps can be utilized to locate any other IoT device connected to Watson that can send Wi-Fi scan events of nearby access points (APs).

After following the recipe steps, the IoT device location (latitude, longitude and uncertainty radius) will be available for each IoT device connected to Watson. The location information can be utilized for locating, tracking and managing devices or resources, geo-fencing and other geolocation use cases.

Wi-Fi Location Process:

• The device collects information from all of the Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) or other beacons within range.
  • Information collected includes SSID, MAC Address and Signal Strength.
  • Communication with the APs is not required
  • IoT devices in urban areas typically receive greater than 40 APs 
• The Watson cloud application, using TruePosition's Location API, passes the collected information to TrueFix cloud servers.
• TrueFix calculates the possible location of the IoT device based on the Wi-Fi access points in the crowd-sourced database.
  • The database can be cloud-based or be on-premise
• TrueFix returns the IoT device location back to the Watson cloud application

NOTE:  The TrueFix HTTPS API currently supports GPS and Cellular data use if available. The IBM Watson recipe will be updated in the future to also support this capability.

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