barnowl-cisco converts the decodings of any Bluetooth Low Energy devices by Cisco access points into standard developer-friendly JSON that is vendor/technology/application-agnostic.
Clone this repository, install package dependencies with npm install, and then from the root folder run at any time:
npm start
barnowl-cisco will attempt to connect to a MQTT broker on localhost and subscribe to the topic cisco/iotorchestrator/v1/#. Any messages published by IoT Orchestrator will be processed and output as (flattened) raddec JSON to the console.
Developing an application directly from barnowl-cisco? Start by pasting the code below into a file called server.js:
const Barnowl = require('barnowl');
const BarnowlCisco = require('barnowl-cisco');
let barnowl = new Barnowl({ enableMixing: true });
barnowl.addListener(BarnowlCisco, {}, BarnowlCisco.TestListener, {});
barnowl.on('raddec', (raddec) => {
console.log(raddec);
// Trigger your application logic here
});From the same folder as the server.js file, install package dependencies with the commands npm install barnowl-cisco and npm install barnowl. Then run the code with the command node server.js and observe the simulated data stream of radio decodings (raddec objects) output to the console:
{
transmitterId: "fee150bada55",
transmitterIdType: 2,
rssiSignature: [
{
receiverId: "ffff80ff0000",
receiverIdType: 2,
rssi: -77,
numberOfDecodings: 1
}
],
packets: [ '...' ],
timestamp: 1645568542222
}See the Supported Listener Interfaces below to adapt the code to listen for your AP(s).
The following listener interfaces are supported.
barnowl.addListener(BarnowlCisco, {}, BarnowlCisco.MqttListener,
{ url: "mqtt://localhost", topic: "specify/topic/here" });Provides a steady stream of simulated messages for testing purposes.
barnowl.addListener(BarnowlCisco, {}, BarnowlCisco.TestListener, {});Cisco IoT Orchestrator v1.x encodes data using Protocol Buffers, and, to decode the data, barnowl-cisco uses a JavaScript bundle of the proto definitions. The proto definition can be found in the Cisco Sensor Connect for IoT Services: Partner Developer Guide, and also in the /proto folder of this repository.
Compiling the proto definitions into a JavaScript bundle requires pbjs from the protobufjs-cli, which must first be installed as follows:
npm install -g protobufjs-cli
Then compile the IoT Orchestrator proto definition with the following command:
npm run iotorchestratorproto
which will compile and bundle, using pbjs, the defintions from /proto into the file /lib/iotorchestratorproto.js.
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MIT License
Copyright (c) 2026 reelyActive
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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