All That Corona Virus Data

Many people have seen the nifty dashboard that John’s Hopkins University put out where you can see the number of COVID-19 cases, etc. throughout the world. It’s really nice and all, but what if you wanted to slice and dice the data yourself? Well, as it turns out, they are also publishing all the underlying data in a GitHub repository! It’s all published as daily CSV (comma separated values) files. Makes it super easy to import into Excel spreadsheets, but spreadsheets are so over.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

March 18, 2020 Read
Snack Tracking with the new InfluxDB Arduino Library

A New Library Many of you Arduino enthusiasts are probably aware of the existing InfluxDB library that was maintained by Tobias Schürg for many years. Hats are off to him for providing this library and maintaining it for so long. With the arrival of InfluxDB 2.0, it was time to update the library. Some of you may remember that I did a quick update to support the InfluxDB 2.0 OSS a few months ago, and that was working well, but InfluxData has been working towards a set of consistent, InfluxData-maintained set of client libraries.

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March 13, 2020 Read
This Whole Thing Stinks!

First of all, don’t ask I have no idea where this idea came from, it just happened. I keep saying “I’m not especially proud of this” but in reality? I sort of am because it’s funny as shit (pun intended). Some projects came across my twitter feed that included (I shit you not) a 3-D printable model of the 💩 emoji. I remember nothing else about that project, but you’d better believe that I went straight for that STL file!

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March 11, 2020 Read
Building the World's Smallest InfluxDB Server

I’ve built a lot of InfluxDB servers in my time here, and I’ve built some pretty esoteric ones at that, but I think I’ve finally pulled off what can only be described as the World’s Smallest InfluxDB Server! Back in the summer of 2019, I saw a project on CrowdSupply.com for something called the ‘Giant Board’. It looked really, really cool! A complete Single Board Computer (SBC) that ran Linux, all in a Feather form factor.

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February 13, 2020 Read
IoT Data from Other Sources MySQL

If you’ve deployed an IoT solution, you’ve had to decide where, and how, to store all your data. At least from my perspective, the best and easiest place to store the sensor data is, of course, InfluxDB. My saying that can’t come as a surprise to you. But what about the other data you need to store? The data about the sensors? Things like the sensor manufacturer, the date it was placed into service, the customer ID, what kind of platform it’s running on.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

December 5, 2019 Read
Sensing with The Things Network

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!

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October 10, 2019 Read
Hiding Complexity with Custom Functions Calculating Heat Index

Have you ever watched the local weather — or The Weather Channel — and heard them announce the temperature, and then the “Heat Index”? Or how hot it feels outside? At least here in the United States, and especially in the South, it’s part of every weather broadcast in the summer. But have you ever wondered how they actually calculate the Heat Index? Since I collect temperature and humidity data, I decided one day I’d go and figure it out.

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August 23, 2019 Read
How to Output Data from Flux to MQTT Natively

Writing data from InfluxDB to MQTT using Flux I started using the Open Source (OSS) version of InfluxDB v2.0 very early on in the Alpha releases. Even in the early releases, I was very enamored with the way things were shaping up. But as you know, I do a lot of IoT builds, and use InfluxDB for all of it, so there were a few things I needed it to do that it just didn’t, yet.

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August 23, 2019 Read
Rev'ing the Demo Hardware

If you’ve been reading me for any length of time at all, you’ll know that I build lots of little hardware projects. What better way to highlight the IoT capabilities of InfluxDB than to build hardware that writes data to it constantly! But some of my hardware demos have been getting old, and some of them have been getting abused, so I decided it was time to revamp them with some new hardware, I’m even going to make them fully wireless by adding LiPo batteries so they can go mobile during presentations and demos!

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June 5, 2019 Read
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.

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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.

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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.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

March 22, 2019 Read