HotLoop IoT overview

IoT is out, first released in 4.18.10

The image is ghcr.io/hotloop-io/hotloop-iot:4.18.10 for amd64, arm64 and arm/v7, about 31 MB on amd64 and 29 MB on a Pi, and the chart is hotloop-iot from https://hotloop.io/hotloop. Both pull with no login, and the source repo is still private. The Quadlet units are the iot/ directory of Podman Quadlet. Install it. The pages in this section say what each feature has been run against, and where a page follows main and not the release, it says that too.

IoT is the base the other three products are built on. If the box in front of you is a Pi, a NUC in a closet, a rack of smart plugs and sensors, or one PLC on a bench, this is the one. It is the smallest image of the three full products, and it still carries everything that makes HotLoop useful: the entities, the rules, the alarms and the one write gate that nothing gets around.

A bigger product never takes anything away from it. Edge is IoT plus the machine layer. The Gateway is Edge plus the site layer. Everything on these pages is in both of them.

What IoT has

• Entities and the equipment tree. Every tag gets an entity with an id that never changes, hung on one ISA-95 tree. Entities, the equipment tree.
• Automations, blueprints, scripts and recipes. Rules compiled when you save, and named sequences and setpoint sets that go through the write gate. Automations, blueprints, scripts, recipes.
• Helpers, the logbook and the sun. The values your people own, one timeline of everything that happened, and sunrise worked out on the box. Helpers, logbook, the sun.
• Dashboards, notifications and MCP. Screens built per role, alarms that page a phone, and an agent that can read the plant and touch only what you armed. Dashboards, notifications, MCP.
• Every protocol driver, MQTT with discovery, and an embedded broker. Protocols, the broker, MQTT discovery, network discovery.
• UniFi, read-only, and history written out to your own database. UniFi, historian targets.
• Users, backups and migrations that only add. Authentication, backups, migrations, and the HTTP API.

The write gate is the one page to read before a real plant sees any of this. It applies to every product.

What it doesn’t have

No OPC UA server, no Sparkplug publishing with store and forward, no fleet, no multi-site, no scheduled reports. Those aren’t switched off in IoT, they aren’t in the binary, so no environment variable and no bad day can turn them on. The API keeps every route anyway, and a route for something IoT doesn’t have answers 404 and names the product that does.

Databases

SQLite or PostgreSQL. The chart and the Quadlet units run PostgreSQL 16 by default, with 30 days of history kept, and HOTLOOP_DB_TYPE=sqlite puts the whole thing on a file with no database container at all. In the chart that is database.type, and asking the IoT chart for timescaledb fails the install. Moving to another database is a backup and a restore. The lineup has the table, and Backups has the restore.

Installing it

Helm or Podman Quadlet, the same two ways as the rest of the lineup, and the IoT install page has the commands for both. The boxes follow :stable and update themselves, and that page says what happens when an update can’t start.