This page will guide you through the process of setting up a new 'thing' on AWS, and creating the required certificates to enable the WICED Feather to talk to the AWS IoT MQTT servers.

Enable AWS Services for your Amazon Account

Before you can do anything, you will need to make sure that your Amazon account has billing enabled (even if you are using a free AWS plan!) and that your account is associated with a valid credit card.

You will also need to verify your identity, which you can do by clicking on the following link: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html

This will call the phone you associated with your account, and you will supply a PIN number, and you will then be able to select the AWS support plan that you wish to use:

If you don't have a valid credit card associated with your account and if you haven't verified your account, you will get the following error whenever you try to use AWS IoT via the AWS Console:

There may be a delay of up to 24 hours for the account activation to take effect. You can test the account status by clicking a related link like https://console.aws.amazon.com/lambda/home which will show you the following screen if your account activation is still in progress:

If your billing information is up to date, but the error message persists when trying to create a 'thing' (later in this tutorial) you can try resubscribing to AWS services with the following link: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup?type=resubscribe#/ 

Login to AWS IoT Admin

The first thing to do once you have a verified account is to login to the AWS Console. If you don't already have an account you can create one, or login with your existing details

From the AWS Console home page, find the AWS IoT icon shown below and click on it:

Click the Get Started button on the AWS IoT homepage:

Create a Thing

Before you can work with AWS IoT you will need to 'Create a Thing', which is done via the wizard shown below:

If you didn't use the Get Started button and don't see the wizard above, you can find it by clicking on the Resources link in the top-right hand corner, and then clicking the Create a resource button shown below:

Name the thing led (no attributes or type) and click the create button:

You should see a small box with your new 'thing' in the bottom left-hand side of the screen:

Click the View Thing button to see the details for your new 'led' thing on the right-hand side of the admin console:

Connect a Device

With the thing opened up on the side panel, click the Connect a Device button in the bottom right-hand corner, and select the Embedded C option:

Then click the Generate certificate and policy button that appears on the right-hand side:

Download the Private Key and Certificate to a folder, since you will need to place these files in the same location as your WICED Arduino sketch later on:

Click the Confirm & start connecting button to continue.

Store the Thing Connection Details

At this point, you should see some C pre-processor macros that contains the information necessary for the WICED Feather to connect to the AWS IoT servers.  Copy these values, and store them somewhere in a text file since they will need to be added to the AWS Arduino Sketch we'll edit in a moment: