To set or change the configuration of the IoTT Stick, you can use a web browser, either on your smart phone or on a PC. If the IoTT Stick is connected to your Wifi network, you simply type the IP address that is displayed on the Stick into your browser and the first configuration page is loaded. If the Stick provides its own Access Point, you first have to connect your PC or smart phone to the Stick and then load the indicated web page. In both cases you will be presented with the Node configuration page, which is used to set the basic work mode and select embedded logic modules.
In the first section, you select the communication module and the hat. For example, if you want to use the BlueBox hat and feed it with commands directly from the track power, you select DCC and BlueHat. If you prefer to receive the commands directly from LocoNet, you can connect the LocoNet interface to the Grove port and select LocoNet.
If you select a LocoNet based option, the Bushby bit checkbox will appear. Check it if you want the IoTT Stick to emulate the behavior of a Digitrax command station when the Bushby bit is set. If you are not familiar with this powerful option, check the link in the description below.
The Embedded Logic Module section lets you activate the IoTT Stick’s built in logic modules. Right now the only option is the Button handler, which is used to translate button activity into commands for signals, switches, and more. It will be described in a separate video. Also, there will be more Embedded Logic modules released in the future, so it is a good idea to subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon so you will be in a premium seat when new features become available.
The remaining options on the Node configuration page are used to define the Wifi access. Define the node name to be used for the access point and whether to include the MAC Address into the node name to make it unique. This option is useful when you have several sticks providing access points at the same time.
The most important selection is whether the stick should connect to your Wifi network or provide an access point on its own.
If you set the stick to connect to your Wifi, you can also specify whether it should use a static or dynamic IP. If you don’t care or you don’t know what this means, select dynamic.
Furthermore you can specify whether the Stick should get the actual time from an internet time server. You can specify an NTP server for your region, and specify the time zone settings. Normally it is best to use a server pool to avoid problems with server downtime. I leave you links for more information on servers and time zone settings in the description below.
If you select Device A/P you will get data fields to specify the Access point name and IP it will be using. Note that if you use the Device A/P you will no longer be able to select MQTT or Gateway as command source, as these options require an active Wifi connection to access the MQTT server.
At the end of the page you have four buttons:
Click Save&Restart to make your changes permanent. The web page will write the data to the IoTT Stick and then reboot the Stick to come up with the new options.
Click Cancel to disregard all changes and restore all data fields to the current settings.
Save to File let’s you download the current stick settings and store them to a file on your computer. Should your Stick ever lose the configuration settings, you can simply use the Load from File button, pick the saved information and reload it to the stick. Note that the Save to File button downloads the entire configuration, including hat and embedded module settings, not only the information set on the configuration page.
When you safe and restart the Stick, you may see that some of the menu entries in the top line are changing. For example, if you switch from DCC to LocoNet as command source, the DCC Viewer tab will change to LocoNet Viewer. Other page tabs may appear or disappear as well, so the web pages always reflect the current configuration of the stick to make configuration as simple as possible.
