Serial Number (S/N)

[pauloodwazny]

Hello, 

I have a Magelis IoT Core Box (HMIBSCEA53D1L0T).
So, we develop an application that needs to link to the software with the hardware. For this, we decided to use the Schneider Electric serial number (S/N: TBN5492734) because it is easy to locate in the IoT frame.
The question is, how to get this info in a node-red application?

Thanks a lot,

Paulo.

[Gilly]

Hello Paulo,

if i understand correctly, you want to use Node Red to send a string with the IoT Box S/N to your application. 

There would be many ways to achieve this, if your application is web based and has a web server such as Apache or Nginx you could make use of HTTP nodes, this could require some light programming of the nodes in the flow.

You could also investigate MQTT via Node RED, it is a simple and effective way to exchange messages. 

[pauloodwazny]

Hello @Gilly,
You are right, I will use MQTT to send this string to a cloud.
My problem is that I don´t know how to get this S/N by software.
Is it possible to get this S/N without input it manually? I don´t know, like a Linux command that checks this number in the bios, for example.

[Gilly]

Hi Paulo

you can natively retrieve some information related to the hardware by using some internal nodes provided with the SD Card that comes with the Box. You can check on page 101 of this document:

https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_enDocType=User+guide&p_File_Name=EIO0000003374.03.pd...

However, the S/N is not part of these info available with these nodes. But maybe you can find some of that is usefull. 

I have tried finding existing packages to achieve this, the closer i found is this:

https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-os

But it does not include the HW S/N either, and it does not mention whether it would work with Linux OS. 

Since the S/N is a static info, i would not see any drawback in pushing this message manually though. 

[pauloodwazny]

@Gilly,
Thank you for your effort.
But I really need this S/N.
Maybe it can help, we are testing another IoT brand, in this case we use this Linux command ( fw_printenv board_serial ) to get the S/N.
Do you think that there is something like this in Schneider IoT Operation System?

[Gilly]

Hi Paul

the command should work for Schneider IoT Box too. 

I also found the command below outputs the HW S/N

sudo dmidecode -t system | grep Serial

But this output is only on the CLI of Linux, if there is a way for Node RED to get that and push it to the cloud it would need to be developped, as it doesn't seem like there is a node package available out there to achieve this easily.  

[pauloodwazny]

@Gilly 

hmibsc:/home/user# dmidecode -t system | grep Serial

sh: dmidecode: command not found

This was the Linux Yocto answer, I think that is some package missing. What do you think?

[Gilly]

I have tried myself and indeed this package is ommitted in this distro. I did not manage to install it either and could not find another equivalent command. Though i am not a Linux expert.

I suggest you to look for Schneider's tech support at your location.