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IoT Oil Tank Gauge With IBM Bluemix and Maximo

The concept for this Instructable is to create an IoT device that sends alerts when oil in an oil tank is low. This can be configured for industry, or in this case, to alert a homeowner of a low tank level through a text message and automatically create a work order for an oil delivery company to refill the tank. For hardware, we are going to use the NodeMCU device which is an ESP8266 on a development board, and the hall effect module from the Arduino TinkerKit. I will note that there are MANY ways you could choose to detect the height of the level gauge on the oil tank, so I would encourage experimentation with other sensors as well. Additionally, I chose to use IBM Bluemix to act as a MQTT broker and to host Node-RED. IBM Bluemix is a cloud platform which we will use to easily create a application to connect our IoT devices to other services. Using this we can facilitate communications to other services, such as Twilio and dweet.io, and send http REST requests to interact with external systems. In our case, we will be interacting with IBM Maximo. Maximo is an enterprise asset management system which is commonly used by service providers for work management. It supports REST which we will use to integrate between Bluemix and Maximo.”

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