Publications

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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