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Ingesting GPS Data From Onion Omega2 Devices with Apache NiFi

October 5, 2026 at 9:26 AM
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IoT

Working with IoT data is a many layered process, not unlike a parfait. Scratch that, an Onion. In fact, an Onion Omega2, which is a great device that I just got yesterday does IoT really easily. This is so much easier to setup that RPI or other platforms. It also has a ton of pluggable modules that stack on top of this small chip. It's pretty small powered, but it's under $10.

The device is extremely well documented at their site.

Needed to run real tools, I added a USB stick and used that for storage and for extra SWAP space.

opkg update opkg install kmod-usb-storage-extras e2fsprogs kmod-fs-ext4 umount /tmp/mounts/USB-A1 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 mkdir /mnt/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ ; tar -C /overlay -cvf - . | tar -C /mnt/ -xf - ; umount /mnt/ opkg update opkg install block-mount opkg update opkg install swap-utils block-mount dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/mounts/USB-A1/swap.page bs=1M count=256 mkswap /tmp/mounts/USB-A1/swap.page swapon /tmp/mounts/USB-A1/swap.page free block detect > /etc/config/fstab

Adding GPS

ls /dev/ttyACM* cat /dev/ttyACM0 opkg update opkg install ogps ubus list /etc/init.d/rpcd restart ubus call gps info

Using the GPS Expander, this is the JSON data returned from the utility:

{"age":0,"latitude":"40.2807","longitude":"-74.6418","elevation":"38.4","course":"","speed":"N"}

I then added Python and Paho MQTT Python Client for sending messages to my Cloud MQTT broker.

opkg install python https://docs.onion.io/omega2-docs/installing-and-using-python.html#onion-python-modules opkg install python-pip pip install --upgrade setuptools pip install paho-mqtt crontab -e /etc/init.d/cron restart */1 * * * * /opt/demo/run.sh

Once the data was sent a MQTT broker, it was easy to ingest with Apache NiFi.