Publishing Data to InfluxDB from Swift

I’ve been a very busy man. It was only a few days ago that I wrote about a new InfluxDB library for writing data from Arduino devices to InfluxDB v2 and here I am again, writing about a new library for writing data to InfluxDB. This time, it’s in Swift. Now your native Apple apps can write data directly to InfluxDB v2.0 with ease. It’s a really simple library to use, and you can download the entire Xcode project for it from my GitHub.

March 29, 2019 Read
Using Cross-Measurement math in InfluxDB Flux

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with the 2.0 Alpha releases and I’m here to tell you: some of the new things coming are really, really cool! Especially for IoT. The one I’ve been using lately has been the ability to do math across measurements, which is really a game-changer for IoT data in InfluxDB. Let’s look at why here for a minute. As you probably know, I’ve been building out a bunch of IoT sensors that stream data to various instances of InfluxDB.

March 22, 2019 Read
Writing to InfluxDB 2.0 from Arduino ESP8266

As InfluxData moves ever closer to releasing v2.0, it’s becoming increasingly important to be able to get data into InfluxDBv2, of course. Makes sense, right? Since the vast majority (like, indistinguishable from 100%) of my data comes from IoT devices, I decided it was time to start making those devices InfluxDB v2-capable. I’m happy to say that the first step in that direction is now complete! One of my favorite sensors is a particulate matter sensor that measures the amount of very small particulate in the air (from 2.

March 22, 2019 Read
Connecting The Things Network to InfluxDB

There are many ways to connect your sensors to the network in the IoT. For short-range connections, there is Bluetooth LE, or Zigbee, or 802.15.4, or ZWave. For longer distances (though still fairly short) there’s always WiFi. But when you need longer distances, sometimes very long distances, there’s LoRaWAN. It’s a sub-gigahertz set of frequencies that are available for small bits of data. These are typically only a few bytes of data but can be sent over much longer distances — up to 2 km or more in some instances!

March 10, 2019 Read
Adventures in Golang

I’m not a Golang developer. Let’s just get that out of the way up front. I’ve developed a few things in Go, but a Go developer I’m not. I sort of need to be, but it hasn’t been essential. I decided that it was really time to take the plunge and get serious about Go. Seriously, there’s only so much you can learn by reading the internet. To that end, I have taken 2 actions:

August 20, 2018 Read
Building an InfluxDB IoT Edge Data Collection Device

I’ve been saying I was going to write this whole project up for some time now but it has been such a daunting task that I’ve been putting it off, starting and stopping, and generally not getting it done for a few months. Finally, I have it! This is both a hardware build and a software build, and there are a lot of moving parts, so be prepared! Overview I wanted to build a demonstration system that would show off the capabilities of using InfluxData — the entire TICK Stack — on the extreme edge of an IoT Architecture.

July 20, 2018 Read
Programming the ARTIK-0 IoT Devices

If you’ve read this blog much at all you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a fairly big fan of the ARTIK line of IoT boards (see here, here, here, here, here, here , here and here) but I really need to clarify that a bit now. I love my ARTIK-520 board. It runs the entire InfluxData stack nicely and is a solid, reliable place to deploy IoT-Edge software. I really like it.

July 1, 2018 Read
Here's Why I'm giving up on MyNewt (for now)

With all these sensors and platforms lying around, I wanted to just pick one and build a quick sensor demo. It should be easy, right? The basic idea As you may (or may not) know, I spent a lot of time with the Apache MyNewt project a year or so ago. It has enormous potential. It’s small, fast, and very lightweight. I even wrote a tutorial on developing an app with MyNewt.

April 4, 2018 Read
Building An IoT Gateway Device for local Alerting and Data Downsampling

There are all sorts of ways to architect your IoT Deployment, and what’s right for one enterprise will not necessarily be right for another. Depending on the size and complexity of your IoT project , there can be, of course, a lot of components. One of the more universal architectures is to deploy sensor hubs or gateway devices to collect data from a number of sensor nodes and then forward that data on to an upstream data collection system for the enterprise.

December 18, 2017 Read
Time to Awesome with InfluxDB

InfluxData has a thing about Time to Awesome™. So much so that they Trademarked it. No, seriously, they did. And they mean it. So let’s go from Zero to Awesome! We are singularly focused on reducing the Time to Awesome™, we truly care about helping developers and businesses get to results faster with less complexity and less code. That’s directly from the About section of their website and they really do mean it!

December 1, 2017 Read
Time for a Twitter Transition

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A really long time. Longer than my actual twitter profile would indicate. (I think I first joined in late 2006.) At one point, I had over 5,000 followers, but, well, basically twitter’s security and policing was so atrocious that, for reasons of personal safety, I quit twitter and deleted my account. I was gone for about 2 years. I came back and started fresh in 2012.

October 25, 2017 Read
Time Series Data

I’m just going to drop this here. Don’t need to say much about it, as it’s pretty thorough. Go read it!

September 27, 2017 Read