Connect devices

There are two ways to bring devices into Robonomics: through Home Assistant, or directly, with any device that can sign a transaction or talk to a gateway.

Ready-made hardware and smart home installation come from Pinout Limited. See pinout.cloud for products and services.

Home Assistant

There are three Home Assistant integrations. They do different things, and they are not equally current.

Integration	What it does	State
Robonomics Report Service (Pinout)	Watches Home Assistant for problems. It encrypts an error report, uploads it to IPFS and records its CID on chain. The report becomes a support ticket at your integrator. It also sends a daily heartbeat.	Maintained. Released as pre-releases. Needs Home Assistant 2026.3.1 or newer; install through HACS as a custom repository.
Robonomics integration (airalab)	Remote access to Home Assistant through encrypted transactions under an RWS subscription, plus users and backups.	Stale. The last release is 2.2.1 from October 2025. It uses the old `robonomics-interface` 1.6.3, needs a local IPFS node, and its default endpoints still point to Kusama, which has stopped. A Polkadot endpoint can be chosen. It has not been checked against the current runtime.
Altruist integration (airalab)	Reads an Altruist sensor over the local network. It does not use the chain.	Small, local only.

The airalab Robonomics integration depends on RWS subscriptions. See Legacy pallets for their current state.

Any device

These are the building blocks for connecting your own device.

Give the device its own account. The key stays on the device.
Pay for its transactions. Either send the account a little XRT (a datalog record costs a fraction of a thousandth of an XRT at the time of writing), or add it to an RWS subscription with rws.set_devices (up to 32 devices) and send its transactions through rws.call.
Describe the installation in the device tree. Create a node for the site and nodes for its devices. Bind the device account to its node as the node’s identity. Grant Write to a gateway if the gateway writes for the device. See Device tree (CPS).
Write data. Put the current state in the node’s payload (up to 8 KiB), or write records with datalog.record (up to 512 bytes, legacy). Put bigger data on IPFS and write its CID.
Send commands, if needed. The legacy launch call sends a signed command event to a device account. See Launch.

Libraries for each step: Python robonomics-interface, JavaScript @polkadot/api, and Rust libcps with the cps tool. See Client libraries.

Gateways for small devices

Not every device can talk to the chain. These open-source gateways sit in between:

edge (airalab/robins): takes signed messages over HTTP and Meshtastic and passes them on over libp2p GossipSub.
mqtt-bridge (airalab/robins): turns MQTT messages into device-tree updates.
sensors-connectivity (airalab/sensors-connectivity): collects signed sensor measurements and passes them to IPFS pubsub and the parachain. It serves the sensors on sensors.social.

The public relay nodes and their status are at pubsub.robonomics.network.