A truly connected future is not only about aggregating data from telematics and IoT devices, but also about aggregating data from telematics and IoT platforms. Despite a great variety of supported GPS trackers, flespi is not only about connecting telematics hardware to your service. We take a wider perspective and consider flespi a data hub that consolidates your data residing in different platforms along with the data from connected hardware.
Just imagine, flespi interacts with the cloud platforms to fetch the information from desired vehicles and transforms the retrieved information into standardized message format. What is left for you is enjoy having this information inside your flespi account ready for consumption by the destination of your choice. No worries about underlying HTTP requests and responses, XML schemas, JSON payloads, authentications, expiring access tokens, and other stuff — we bury all these difficulties inside flespi since you don’t have to notice them. We are connecting clouds for you.
What does the platform integration process involve?
We integrate protocols that communicate with various cloud platforms via the API provided by them. Each case is studied and treated individually because all the platforms have their own peculiarities. When done, you just create a proper channel in flespi and start getting information from the platform in channel messages.
For example, GeoSensorX protocol connects flespi with the GeoSensorX Cloud. The company produces vehicle dash cameras with vision processing engine that triggers road and driver safety events and sends them to GeoSensorX Cloud. Thanks to the integration, you have these events together with the accompanying information in flespi.
Another integration — General-Motors-OnStar protocol — connects flespi with the GM OnStar Cloud and allows you to receive desired information about your GM vehicles — telemetry, diagnostic trouble codes (DTC) notifications, hard acceleration and hard brake alerts, and a lot more.
Trakm8-gateway protocol connects a fully fledged Trakm8 telematics platform with flespi!
Some of our precious integrations are such protocols as Fleetboard and Scania-FMS that connect flespi with the Fleetboard and Scania fleet management services respectively and allow you to have information about your Mercedes-Benz and Scania trucks within flespi.
Check our website for an explicit list of all integrated platforms. Didn't find the platform you want to pair with flespi? Stay tuned, and we will tell you what to do :)
So, with flespi you may put together data from various cloud platforms and stream them all to the application of your interest, say Wialon or Traccar. That’s why we realize a great importance of such integrations and are open for the new ones you need.
Recent case: integration with the Invers platform via AMQP
There’s one fresh integration we would like to tell you about. One of our customers asked us about integration with Invers — a powerful platform that provides a turnkey solution for shared mobility businesses.
We looked at the provided API at a glance and decided that the integration was going to be quite usual — the platform provides REST API and that's our game. But when we made it to the implementation, it turned out that it’s not recommended to consume events via HTTP GET Poll Events requests as this is resource-intensive. The preferred way of consuming real time events from Invers is AMQP (Advanced Message Queue Protocol) queue.
Yeap, this is a smart approach similar to the one we use in flespi — we publish real-time messages into the MQTT broker and recommend our customers to subscribe to them via MQTT for efficient consumption of messages from flespi in real-time.
We didn’t have any experience with AMQP. But “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This motto along with our natural developers' curiosity urged us to embark on this challenging task — create a basic AMQP client implementation capable of communicating with the Invers AMQP server and consuming telematics events.
Our backend services are written in pure C and we prefer not to rely on external components but rather create our own stuff, that’s why we created our own implementation of AMQP client that is now a main work-horse under the hood of the Invers-OneAPI protocol.
Now connecting Invers cloud with flespi is as easy as creating a channel with ‘invers-oneapi’ protocol and specifying the valid connection credentials. Then you start receiving Invers events in flespi channel messages. Clouds connected.
This integration was a clear win-win — we’ve extended our technological expertise by deeply involving in AMQP technology and our valued customer didn’t need to face any of the difficulties and had more time to enjoy the sunsets.
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In our view, the connected future is not only about consolidating data from versatile devices, but also about consolidating data flows from versatile platforms. This is what we focus on. This is what we excel at.
If you are interested in a similar integration on flespi, contact us in the flespi support chat.