Packet Tracer 7.x - Internet of Things tutorials

What is Arduino ?

Arduino is a hardware and software company building microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control physical devices.

The project is based on microcontroller board designs, produced by several vendors, using several microcontrollers. Arduino boards provide digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that can interface to different expansion boards  and other circuits. The boards feature serial and USB communication interfaces for loading programs from computers to the boards.

Programming the microcontrollers is done through the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) based on a programming language named Processing, which also supports the languages C and C++.

Arduino at Cisco Live 2016

Arduino organised a technical challenge at Cisco Live 2016. The idea was that people at the Cisco event could discover and play with some fun Arduino projects like a RFID lock, a colour sensing and display thing, and a light sensitive theremin. Have a look on the video ;-)

Arduino language implemented in Packet Tracer 8.2

Packet Tracer 7.0 was the first Cisco Packet Tracer release including IoT features. This version includes IoT components and microcontroller (MCU-PT) or single boarded computers (SBC-PT) to connect them to the network. The microcontroller board emulate Arduino hardware and can be programmed using the same Processing language.

function setup() {
 pinMode(0, INPUT);
} 

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
}

  function loop() {
  	Serial.println(digitalRead(0));
  }
 

void loop()
{
  if (digitalRead(buttonPin) == HIGH)
    Serial.write('H');
  else
    Serial.write('L');

  delay(1000);
}

pinMode(1, OUTPUT); 
pinMode(2, INPUT);

void setup()
{
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);      // sets the digital pin as output
}

void loop()
{
  digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // sets the LED on
  delay(1000);                  // waits for a second
  digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // sets the LED off
  delay(1000);                  // waits for a second
}

var val = digitalRead(1); 

void loop()
{
  val = digitalRead(inPin);   // read the input pin
  digitalWrite(ledPin, val);    // sets the LED to the button's value
}

digitalWrite(1, HIGH);

void loop()
{
  digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // sets the LED on
  delay(1000);                  // waits for a second
  digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // sets the LED off
  delay(1000);                  // waits for a second
}

Tutorial description

This tutorial will provide guidelines to simulate a fully automated IoT environment using the capabilities of the new Cisco Packet Tracer 8.2 devices.

A MCU board connected to smoke and temperature sensors will act as a remote Fire Detection Unit. The board will be securely wifi connected to a 829 ISR router.

A SBC bord connected to a visual alarm will act as a Fire Alarm System.

Both IoT board will register to a central IoE server which will provide automation capabilities to raise the Fire Alarm if a fire is detected by the Remote Fire Sensor.

What is IoX ?

Cisco IoX hosts applications in a virtual machines running on an hypervisor hosted on an IoX capable hardware called fog node. Cisco IoX is delivered with a pre-packaged Yocto Linux distribution but developpers are free to use any operating system. Yocto has been selected by Cisco because of it's various CPU architectures support, it's comprehensive SDK, and it's slim design to work on resource constraint platforms like routers.

What's blocky ?

Blockly is a visual programmation editor which uses uses graphical blocks to represent code concepts like variables, logical expressions, loops, and more. It helps students to better understand and apply programming principles without having to worry about the specific syntax of a specific programming language.

Code can then be exported to popular programming languages such as python, javascript, ...