How to figure out the country of a device connected to AWS IoT Core

Question

Hey Stackoverflow crowd,

does anybody know a mechanism on how to identify the country in which a device connected to AWS IoT core is located? Is it possible to get this information out of the box or do I need to implement this manually by storing the country information in an attribute when provisioning the device?

Thanks a lot and best regards The Smart Home Maker

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean on getting information out of the box,- I don't know about any possibility to detect country in AWS IoT core without adding this information manually.

There are at least two ways how you can achieve this:

• As you mention - save this information in attribute on device. But this can be not very handy if you manage some dynamic installations of devices as example,- in case of changing location every device should be updated (and not all devices can store this).

• Example that we using in our solution - Enrich event on the fly by AWS IoT Core rule and DynamoDB. Here the idea is:

  • every device can be identified by MAC or SN as example (we setting this to topic name).
  • DynamoDB with device list (indexed by SN or MAC) - which is holding information you want to add to event.
  • AWS IoT core rule that getting every incoming event, on the fly requestion dynamoDB for additional info using get_dynamodb() , adding this to event and follow with action (as example republish to different topic).