Create a IoT dashboard in my website

Question

Hi, I'm first time here. I'm new to IoT and I tried some IoT platforms like thingspeak and adafruit. Now I want to create my own IoT dashboard in my website .

Does anybody have a good idea or experience on this ?

Robert Peter Oakes · Answer

I would use something like NODE-RED for the dashboard, it will also manage your workflows etc. Use smaller less complex devices for the edge (ESP8266, Arduino YUN, etc) Node Red has a dashboard capability and can also integrate to a huge number of remote peripherals with ease See some of my posts here https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=node+red+thebreadboardca , along with many others

BigG · Answer

There are so many options to choose from and it cannot be done in isolation without evaluating the dataflows and requirements of application from sensor through to user. It also very much depends on your own personal preferences as to how much control you want and how much experience you have with creating websites yourself, as you would probably need to apply a suitable MVC architecture in combination with the right javascript framework. Besides that, you could try any of the following (just a couple listed by way of example): https://firebase.google.com/ Keen IO - Analytics for Developers https://www.carriots.com/ Wia | Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things https://thethings.io/ https://www.artik.io/ Then, if you want to build from the ground up: https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/ https://aws.amazon.com/iot/

Robert Peter Oakes · Answer

OK, so lets give this another try...

Adafruit ( https://io.adafruit.com/ ) and ThingSpeek ( https://thingspeak.com/ )are simply data analytics platforms that support protocols that IOT Devices can use, they will concentrate the data and with a bit of work, present it to you in some meaningful way, they are not "The Internet of things" nor are they an IOT Device. in fact they are possibly the last part in the process and provide little control back to your sensor (IOT Edge Device) and would not be terribly quick to do so. They can have actions configured to provide some control of your solution but what if you provides have an outage or you need very quick response to certain scenarios ..........

Things like Node-Red can provide both a way to display your data when combined with other applications like SQLite3 and perhaps MQTT to include historical data (Trending), this would provide you the most control over your solution (Home Automation for instance). There are some providers out there that can provide services like MQTT Brokers and even a Node-Red based dashboard but you can also choose to implement this locally and therefor not have issues when the Internet access is temporarily unavailable (Stuff happens). It takes nothing more than say a Raspberry PI or an IOT2020 to get this control system up and running including providing a WEB interface and a workflow engine along with storage for historical data.

You can even publish this data to an external service like Adafruit or Thingspeek if you like, the difference is that none of your sensors need to know about this fact and the ONLY device that publishes outside of your local network would be this PI / IOT2020 gateway / controller. but it does not have to, this is a great security feature and allows much better security to be implemented at the gateway

this is also very easy to implement and your are no longer bound to some cloud service that may or may not last as free... it puts you in control of your system. If you want remote access to turn on lights and change temperatures, that is easy too. If you want sme of the Data to be analyzed and displayed by a cloud service then it is the gateway that will publish it and only what you want. the rest is kept private and also only one device needs to be changed if you want to change cloud service or add another.

In my opinion this is the prefered way to implement this and I speak from experience having worked in big organizations where distributed data and analytics have been an important part of the solution. I am talking about country level and Provincial level solutions covering thousands of mile in distance and hundreds or thousands of devices feeding data.

Things to think about

1. SECURITY, who ill have access to the data and how will they get to it

2. ARCHIVE DATA, where do you want it stored and how will you access it (Trending, Graphs etc), do you want it stored in some foreign country where your data is not regarded as yours and that government can look as often as they want.

3. WHAT DATA. sending external temperature and humidity etc out to a cloud service or other public platform can be helpful to others but not your specific address or other personal identifying information (When your heating kicks in or when to turn on / off lights in the home, it is surprising how little data can be used to find out if your at home, what your habits are and when best to break into your premises

4. Ease of Maintenance, if every one of your sensors is configured for external transmission of data, and also to receive remote commands from say a cell phone app, then what happens when your provider changes you IP address or blocks a port for some reason, you have to go to all those devices and update them. If they all go through a local (To Them) gateway then you have only one thing to update...

Hope this helps explain my previous answer, please also go watch some of the videos I have published on my youtube channel on IOT. there are many examples on how to implement what I am talking about ( https://www.youtube.com/thebreadboardca )

BigG · Answer

Creating a platform is simply a mechanism to accept incoming messages, translate what they mean and store the result. Then you will want to have means to view the results in a meaningful and user friendly way. So to do this requires the right infrastructure. If you want a platform but don't want to own the hardware, like computer servers, then something like AWS would do the trick as they have all the building blocks available. If, as you say, you want to create the platform on own infrastructure, such as RPI, then a LAMP install, for example, would suffice to get you building the application. With a default LAMP config you will then be constrained to using http as your communication protocol. If you want more options, such as using MQTT as your communication layer, then look at installing a server config which includes nodejs. If it's just widgets you're after, like those seen on io.adafruit dashboard, for web interface then it's a case of searching online for the right JavaScript library. Tying the front end with the data then requires use of MVC architecture and framework like AngularJS or using Ajax.

BigG · Answer

So basically you want to learn how to make a web-page to view data which is on your RPi3. I think the previous suggestion about using Node-Red ( https://nodered.org/ ) would be a very good way to do it. If you really want to build a one-off then worth searching online for things like "How To Host A Website With Raspberry Pi". This will allow you to get started. Now, it's difficult to understand how much you know / don't know. So apologies if this is rehashing stuff you already know. If you have sensors attached to the RPi3 you will use something like Python to read those values. The values are now in runtime memory. You can decide to store that data somewhere so that it persists. Now a web-page will then need to somehow get hold of that data for you to see it. If the webpage is simply displaying a snapshot of the data then this is referred to as a static web-page. If you are wanting to see that data updating on the webpage (like thingspeak) then this is called a dynamic web-page. This is where MVC architecture and scripting languages like Javascript have a role to play. Buttons and charts etc. are typically created through a mixture of CSS (styling) and Javascripting. It is worth looking at stuff like: Documentation - Materialize http://getbootstrap.com/ https://jqueryui.com/ Chart.js | Open source HTML5 Charts for your website https://d3js.org/ https://canvasjs.com/

BigG · Answer

Here is a generic tutorial (would need to adapt to fit RPI): Tutorial: A Node-RED dashboard using node-red-dashboard | Sensetecnic Developer

Create a IoT dashboard in my website

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