Core Development Concepts¶

In this section, we’ll talk about some concepts behind the Afero development process.

Attributes and Values¶

Your device’s attributes and values, and how the Afero Platform uses them, are concepts foundational to development. To understand your device in terms of its attributes and values, think about what your device can do (its attributes), then the ways in which it can do it (its values).

Let’s look at an example, a simple light bulb:

The Light Bulb Example

Our example light bulb has two attributes:

• It can be turned on and off, so Power is the first attribute.
• It can shine varying degrees of brightness, so Brightness is the second.

For each attribute, we need to decide the possible values:

• Power can be either On or Off.
• Brightness can range from 0% to 100%.

When deciding on attributes, you can create attributes for all the functions your device is capable of, or just selected ones. You are free to decide what kind of control you want to give your user, and how granular you want that control to be. There’s a lot of flexibility built into the system to accommodate your specific design goals. (Read more in Great Attribute Modeling.)

Next, we’ll talk about how device attributes and values translate into user controls on a mobile app.

The Mobile App UI¶

Now that we have a good idea of the light bulb’s attributes and possible values, think about how a user would control those device functions from a mobile app interface. We’ll stay with our light bulb example:

We want a user to control the light bulb from their Profile Editor, so for each attribute we need to present a suitable UI element that gives the user a reasonable level of control:

• Power can have only two values, so a Switch that toggles On and Off is good control choice:
  
• Brightness can have a range of values, so a Slider is an appropriate choice to control this attribute:

The data type and function of each attribute will suggest the logical UI control element to use. Some examples:

• If you need to display status to the user, use a Value control for an attribute with a data type of UTF8.
• If your attribute offers a range of numeric values (for instance an INT16 data type), a Slider control would work nicely.
• If your device supports a temperature control, there’s a specially designed Temperature control element for you to use, which is a variation of the Slider.

In addition to the controls just mentioned, the Profile Editor offers other standard controls such as buttons, and specialized controls like a battery level display; and more are coming.

All the information that we’ve defined for the light bulb – the attributes and values, the mobile app UI controls – is consumed by the Afero Profile Editor, where it is efficiently packaged into a portable device “Profile”, described next.

The Afero Profile Editor¶

We create a device Profile for the light bulb using the Afero Profile Editor app. The Profile Editor systematically gathers the information it needs so it can create three definitions:

Some basic information
about the type of light bulb

⟶

Device Type Definition

The light bulb’s attributes
and possible values

⟶

Device Attribute Definition

The UI controls that
represent the light bulb’s
attributes in the mobile app

⟶

Mobile App UI Definition

When the definitions are complete, the Profile Editor “publishes” your device’s information to the Afero Platform, to each place it’s needed. Read about the flow in the next section.

Device Profile Distribution¶

The device definitions that the Profile Editor packages into the device Profile are used throughout the Afero Platform. The picture below illustrates the information flow once you click the Publish button in the Profile Editor:

The device Profile leaves the Profile Editor and enters the Afero Cloud. Profiles are stored in the cloud and retrieved on demand by components within the Afero Platform.

• For the Afero mobile app, the Attribute and Mobile App UI definitions (in particular, “device-description.json” and “device-presentation.json”, respectively) are used to create the UI for user control of the light bulb’s power and brightness.
• For ASR, the Device Attributes are installed into it via the Afero Secure Hub. ASR can then securely report device state to the Afero Cloud and be controlled by the mobile app via the Afero Cloud and hub.
• For the device MCU, a header file (“device-description.h”) is generated, which must be included in any MCU code you write that uses afLib.

Next: Getting Started

Updated July 30, 2021