Scenarios#

Introduction#

The design and development of Kotori follows common needs and requirements from the community, reflecting different use cases. The example gallery outlines some specific cases where Kotori has been used.

For users#

Kotori streamlines the process of collecting, storing, visualizing and postprocessing measurement and telemetry data. Forget about ad-hoc setups for recording data followed up by custom postprocessing steps often involving tedious manual transport-, conversion- and import-tasks.

A quick overview should get you an idea:

  • Receive and ingest measurement data using open or proprietary industry protocols and standards such as MQTT, UDP or HTTP.

  • Collect measurement data from wired or wireless sensors and interfaces.

  • Convert and transcode measurement data from/to different payload formats such as CSV, JSON, XML, etc.

  • Persist measurement data into contemporary databases and storage systems such as TSDB, RDBMS or NoSQL without further ado.

  • Rewrite and redistribute data through a variety of egress data channels.

  • Instantly display measurement values on arrival using default database dashboards.

  • Build advanced dashboards interactively using Grafana.

  • Notify subscribed users or devices of events like above-/below-threshold or data-loss.

For integrators#

Kotori is a toolbox for creating vendor solutions in different areas:

  • Build field systems receiving telemetry data transmitted from vehicles and moving objects like in the pilot project Hydro2Motion, carried out with the University of Applied Sciences in Munich. This was about collecting and visualizing telemetry data and position information from a fuel-cell powered vehicle while being on-track at the Shell Ecomarathon 2015 in Rotterdam.

  • Create distributed data collector platforms like Hiveeyes, the sensor data collection network for a Berlin-based beekeeper collective.

  • Integrate a maintenance-free measurement data collector into the toolbox at your laboratory or test bench setup. Adapts seamlessly to your local environment by reusing or interfacing with established on-site or customer-specific communication protocols and hardware. LST uses Kotori for collecting and decoding binary payloads of their in-house telemetry system.

For developers#

Kotori is built upon a powerful service composition framework. Its goals are making it convenient for developers to ingest, emit and distribute data between different data sources and data sinks, and to transcode payloads between different formats. It ships with built-in adapters to different popular software bus- and storage-systems. Batteries included.

We are standing on the shoulders of giants:

  • Leverage the open infrastructure based on Twisted - an event-driven networking engine - to implement custom software components.

  • Listen and talk M2M using the MQ Telemetry Transport connectivity protocol and software bus (MQTT).

  • Store data points into InfluxDB, a leading open source time series database suitable for realtime analytics and sensor data storage.

  • Automate dashboard management in the context of data arriving on different data channels using Grafana, an open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor.

  • Make Browser clients first-class citizens of the underpinning software bus framework delivering bidirectional communication with publish/subscribe or rpc semantics using the Autobahn implementation of the Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP), which in turn is based on WebSockets.

  • Integrate with mqttwarn for emitting and broadcasting data to a multitude of targets and receivers.

  • Accept new protocols, write adapters, decoders and handlers for specific devices, data formats and databases.

  • A lightweight and hackable SCADA system based on contemporary technologies and a solid foundation of open source software components you always have been looking for.