JS would be our preferred choice these days, probably a Node.js Express implementation. You can use stacks such as PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, and, of course, JavaScript. There are many technology options available to construct this web service. Microservices and FileMakerĪ microservice is nothing but a tiny web service, meaning that all you need is an URL to talk to it and send it instructions to execute something. So, for this redux, I decided to adopt a microservice approach in which the fish would be dormant until it receives an instruction. It would be a lot more efficient if we could do away with the constant polling that originates from Billy Bass. The downside of that approach is that the Python script needs to be in a continuous loop to query FileMaker Server through the Data API, looking for flagged records, as outlined in figure 2 below. For the DevCon presentation, I had settled on using a Python script running on the Raspberry Pi.

The magic, of course, is in how Billy Bass receives its instructions and does as it is told. Putting it together for DevCon was quite the adventure that you can revisit in this four-part blog series. The fish is controlled through a Raspberry Pi and can be anywhere as long as it is reachable from the internet. WorkflowįileMaker Server itself is also on AWS, on a Windows EC2 instance in our setup but does not need to be your FileMaker Server can be anywhere.

The FileMaker user types the text of what they want Billy Bass to say, Amazon AWS Polly synthesizes the text to speech, and somehow, Billy Bass speaks it. I’ve outlined the intended setup in figure 1. For my 2018 Developer Conference IoT session, I used Billy Bass to demonstrate how to drive motors from inside FileMaker remotely across the internet.

Filemaker and python