AWS IoT Button

A couple of weeks ago, I saw that Amazon had made their 2nd generation AWS IoT button available. The new one has enough battery to support 2000+ button clicks while the first version only supported 1000 clicks when it was launched May last year. I always wanted to try one of these physical IoT buttons with Sequr to open the door remotely.

With Sequr there are many ways property admins can open the doors remotely such a Sequr Dashboard, Sequr Mobile app, through Slack commands etc.. But in certain cases it would make more sense to click a physical button than logging into Dashboard. For example, lobby receptionist would like to open the door for visitors.

Configuring this IoT button to open the door was pretty simple.

Step 1. Download AWS IoT button app to configure it. This iOS application walks you through a few easy steps to get your IoT Button up and running. Register a button, upload its secured credentials to the button ( public cert and a key) and connect it to your wifi.

Step 2. Set the button action. This is most interesting part. We could invoke any lambda functions to trigger events in the cloud with the click of a button. In my case it was invoking Sequr's webhook to open the door remotely. The lambda event handler provides all necessary information about the button event like - button serial number, battery voltage, click type ( Single, Double or Long) which can be pretty useful to perform different actions.

I was glad to see how easy it was to set it up just in less than 2 hours. Thanks to AWS IoT team that they launched the configuration app otherwise their documentation wasn't that easy to follow.

I tested the button clicks at least 20 times and it worked with consistence response time. The only two concerns I have 1) It takes about 3-4 seconds to connect to wifi ( search SSID, makes DHCP request to get the IP etc..) before it even post an event to AWS. 2) It only supports 2.4 GHz wifi. Though we are excited to try it out in real-world scenario. Stay tuned.