Time well spent, wasted, or something

13 Jan 2023

I spent far too much time last night adding daily high and low temperature display to my Raspberry Pi node red hummingbird feeder monitoring UI.

So many limitations and quirks to work around!

First, Influxdb does not have a “start of day” function, so I had to do that in a node red function. I need that so it doesn’t include yesterday’s readings for today’s highs and lows.

Then, I realized everything is in the UTC timezone, which gives a different meaning to “today”, so I had to adjust that on both ends: in node red AND in the influxdb query.

Things got personal, so I couldn’t quit!

But look! How pretty!

ultimately it was only a few hours, but for that tiny bit of result I was thinking it should have been like 10 minutes! Maybe I need to lower my expectations

Top Comments

scottiebabe over 2 years ago +1

Low of 8!? Ontario got a cold snap recently, almost froze my paws off trying to chop copper clad Great work as always, thanks for sharing!

DAB over 2 years ago

Nice project Nico.

We spent nearly a week below 0 C in December.

We clearly must make some concessions to it being winter.
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ntewinkel over 2 years ago in reply to BigG

Pretty much, yes! In my case I was thinking that I could do it all in one Influxdb call. What was more frustrating was seeing examples of flux (whatever that is?) doing what I need for the “today()” call, and then later seeing the note about this not being available in Influxdb. Also getting max and min in one call is possible, but then you don’t get the related time stamps.
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colporteur over 2 years ago

Been there. Done that. Bought a T-shirt. I can't figure out why I have so many of the same T-Shirt:)
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genebren over 2 years ago in reply to BigG

So true. It's the same feeling you get when you write a simple user interface in VisualBasic and then it grows and grows and becomes a very difficult thing to modify or maintain. But trying to start in a more code driven development environment would have meant a steeper learning curve and the possibility that you might have given up due to a lack of progress.
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BigG over 2 years ago

Yep, I think it relates to starting with the simplest tool you can find, like the no-code Node-Red option, and then quickly finding its limitations... but the thought of starting all over with a better code-based option keeps stopping you from switching... so frustrating this learning curve malarkey.
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