ThingsBoard using FC?

[chipfryer27]

Hi

I might have a project coming up that would generate data from a few dozen sensors and of course capturing the data and making use of it is an important aspect. To that extent I was contemplating ThingsBoard Community Edition.

I see from their website that they have examples for RPi, Arduino and such like to send data, but these all use specific libraries so are not too enlightening. Various methods are described including "GET" and MQTT, but from a brief look at their "How To" guides they are not exactly user friendly if attempting to use a modest microcontroller. They allow you to use a Live Demo hosted on their server to evaluate, which is a nice touch, but if the information required to actually send the data isn't too clear it's maybe not that great. I've looked through their forums, in which many questions don't get any reply let alone a proper answer and there are many such regarding connectivity. My impression is that focus is on what you can do with the software over actually obtaining data.

Initially I thought on TB as they claim it can run on a Pi3B+, but from further reading that isn't a great idea. Whilst it can be done it's not recommended. It will be slow and will screw up your SD card before you know it. Better to use a PC of sorts, even a SFF. My potential application would have suited a Pi far better than a PC though.

TB does seem a very powerful and capable platform so I was wondering if anyone here has successfully used FC to send data to TB, and if so, any pointers?

I've not tried anything yet as I'm unlikely to be in front of any hardware until late next week, and then my options will be an ESP32 or a PIC with an ESP8266.

Regards

[kersing]

I used it for LoRaWAN devices some time ago but had a hard time upgrading versions. They switched postgresql version at some point and the upgrade procedure failed to work properly, tried all suggested solutions Google presented and ended up trowing the towel and scrapping the cloud VM I was using for it. Lost a few months of data from several sensors.
I’ve switched to Grafana. Nice dashboarding features and allows several different database backends. I’m using node red to accept HTTP requests with data to put that data in a time series database (influx) and create dashboards using Grafana. I found it easy to setup, however I’ve been working with Linux for over 30 years so probably not representative.

[viktor_au]

I am thinking to store the data in MySQL.
Is it possible to use Grafana (installed on Win10) to get data from db at some particular time?

[kersing]

Grafana and MySQL work well together. It’s the database I use for non time series data.

[chipfryer27]

Hi Kersing

Thanks for the information re Grafana. I hadn't thought on separating the tasks (capture / display) so this gives me another option to think on.

I'd initially thought on ThingsBoard as that is a one-stop shop so to speak, handling everything within itself and can be installed locally. The ability to use GET or at a stretch MQTT would be preferred, but I've not seen much in the way of assistance in their forums / documentation other than "use this library", which isn't really much help for a PIC unless you want to examine much code

I'm hoping to be able to try some tests later in the week, and would be keen to hear how others have fared with TB and other services.

Regards