Introduction to Wappsto

Hey, what's up, Guys! Akarsh here from CETech.

Today we are going to check out a web app store named wappsto. Wappsto is a web app store where you can share and, in the future, even sell your data and buy other people's data. In today's world, everything is data-oriented. Everything is based on data from the movie suggestions that you get to the different automated tasks that happen around you. You can also say that in the coming times, data will be the world's most important asset. And from this fact, you can guess how good of a tool can wappsto prove to be.

Wappsto where data exchange between you and me is improving our smart life. It is a sophisticated way to get your smart things and services to work together. Inspired by the AppStore, Wappsto is a web app store where you can find web apps to automate the stuff in your life. We call them ‘wapps’. Wappsto is also a web-based tool to create and run wapps. Wappsto brings together the capabilities of talented developers with the highly personalized needs of individual end-users. Because developers create programs with javascript, they have powerful flexibility, enabling end-users to tackle even the most challenging automation tasks with ease.

So let's go ahead and see what's in store for us.

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Wappsto was created in response to the recurring high-level challenges that developers were facing when developing solutions for customers within the Internet of Things (IoT). The customers wanted to automate their devices' interaction and include third-party things and services in their automation. The desired automation was often complex, but they wanted flexible configurations in a straightforward user interface. And as we know, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for these problems, Therefore the people at wappsto developed a software framework to make creating these personalized solutions easier.

With Wappsto, You can create customized data dashboards with configurable point and click blocks and pre-configured dashboard templates. With Wappsto, you can perform data and device management as well. It stores all the devices' essential data securely and efficiently. It allows the creation of warnings and alarms which can be turned into notifications by email, SMS, or other messaging services. You can also create self-developed wapps or you can use the wappsto block wapps to create your automation. These automations run on wappsto servers even when you are offline and your phone is switched off. Also, there is a dedicated marketplace for frameworks and wapps using which you can extend the functionality of your IoT devices.

Now as we have known some basic things about wappsto, We will head over to some hands-on trial of the wappsto interface. For that, you need to follow the steps mentioned below:-

• First, you have to set up your Wappsto Cloud account to use Wappsto. For that, Just type https://wappsto.com/ in your browser. This will take you to the Cloud Portal of Wappsto.
• Create your account on the Wappsto cloud portal by providing some basic details and completing the authentication.
• After the login, you can see the home page of our dashboard.
• Now you have to add your IoT devices to the Wappsto, and then you can visualize the data by the help of charts and widgets.
• Wappstro uses certificates in order to communicate with cloud services, We can generate the certificates in two modes, one is by using python script and another one is using the web certification method. In this demo, I'm going to show you the second way of generating the certification.
• Navigate to the store tab in the Wappsto dashboard, and you can see the IoT certification manager, click on that and install that. Once you have installed the certification, click on open, and it will direct you to the certification page.
• Here you can see two types of certifications, select the Arduino certification and click on download. Once you have downloaded the certification, click on the WappstoIoT for Arduino.
• It will redirect you to the GitHub page of Wappsto IoT, This repo includes the Arduino example source codes. You can also access the Github repository for this from here. Download this entire repo, we have to add this to your Arduino library.

In this step, we will set things up in our Arduino IDE to make the communication channel complete. The steps for that are as given below:-

• Open the Arduino IDE then go to Sketch→Include Library→Add Zip and select the downloaded GitHub repo.
• Once you have added the library, then open the File→example→Library Example. Select the Wappsto and generic Temperature example.
• Now, we have to add our certificate to this code. For that, save this example in another name and location. Add the downloaded certification file into that project folder.
• Now, close your Arduino IDE and open it up again. Now you can see the certification file added to the project.
• Now change the Wi-Fi SSID and Password in the project file to your Wifi and Password.
• After that, compile the project. Once the compilation is successful, upload the code to your ESP32 board. In this tutorial, we are going to use M5Stick C which is based on esp32 core.
• Select the correct board and com port, then click on upload. After uploading is complete, open the serial monitor and see the results, wait to complete the connection.

So now, As you are done with the Wappsto cloud service setup and the Arduino IDE Setup. It's time to do some setting up at the wappsto cloud dashboard end. For that, follow the below-mentioned steps:-

• Move on to the Wappsto dashboard and navigate to devices, there you can see your ESP32.
• Next, add a widget, and select the chart type.
• Then select the device data variable. In our case, It is Temperature.
• Next, move on to the chart customization and customize it as per your wish.
• And with this, you can see your data in the dashboard.

So this brings us to the end of this project, Today we got to know about a useful tool for IoT applications. You could have observed. How easy it is to design dashboards and create a connection between your IoT application and the Wappsto Cloud service. We have used a basic appliance for demonstration purposes and will try to bring some more interesting ones for you. But until then, you can explore the wappsto marketplace and check some wapps available on wappsto. You will definitely find some useful tools for your IoT Applications.