Hello! This is my first blog post here via Jekyll & Github Pages. 😊
I would like to show you a project I’ve done in the past. I wanted to make some kind of IoT contraption, to gain some experience in Ardunio and ESP family. I thought about making weather/environment measuring device. I had some shitty sensor, though.. it was shitty. XD After some googling about what other sensors were available I stumbled upon a great blog by Kimberly & Robert where they compared a few of these pretty roughly - really, check that out.
So I ordered what they advised me - BME280 by Bosch. An thus - My first real IoT was born:
Powered by NodeMCU board, though I’ve developed the code in C++. The board was really great at the time, had a Wi-Fi, could be powered via microUSB, was tiny and cheap.
I’ve decided to omit any kind of screen to utilize wireless mode, so I could make myself some dashboard and monitor many sensors in real time. That idea brought me to dweet.io which was ok to start with, though later it lacked some features ( especially in subject of the dashboard ). I’ve started looking for other solution, and thus I’ve found Grafana - jesus how beautiful it was! I’ve found out that as a source database InfluxDB could be used, later I moved from Grafana to Chronograf, which is a dashboard solution also by Influx.
There was only one problem. I had no private server, at least not all the time. So I’ve set up everything on my PC, which caused another problem - It was not running 24/7, meaning - No data was saved at night (for the most part).
Resolution? Some kind of ‘slow down mode’ (since the memory space is limited), that would save measurements in memory and upload them once connection to the DB could be established.