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.

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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!

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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April 4, 2018 Read
Honey I Instrumented the Kids

This is my first time using ChatGPT to do translations. Please let me know if they are better (or worse) than the Google Translate versions in other posts This post was originally posted on the InfluxData Blog. Parenting is hard. It’s even harder when your kids are sick. But kids are germ factories, and no matter what you do, they get sick. And then you have to touch them and get the germs on you.

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March 27, 2018 Read
Monitoring Your Wireless Interfaces

This post was originally posted on the InfluxData Blog. If you’ve followed my last few posts, you’ll see that I’ve been waist-deep in routers and wireless stuff. I’m building a larger, more complicated ‘reference architecture’ for IoT monitoring with InfluxDB, and to do that, I’m using all sorts of different boxes. I’m re-using my Pine-64 box (see here) and I wanted to be able to monitor the stats of the Wireless interface.

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January 16, 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.

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December 18, 2017 Read
Monitoring OpenWRT with Telegraf

This post was originally published on InfluxData’s blog. What’s the most popular open source router software in the world? OpenWRT, of course! It’s the go-to firmware replacement for a huge number of routers both for home and business use. So of course, you need to monitor it! Now routers are, strictly speaking, an IoT device, but hey, it is a (relatively) small, embedded device that is ubiquitous, and really deserves some attention.

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December 18, 2017 Read
Architecting IoT Gateway Devices for Data Downsampling

There are all sorts of ways to architect your IoT Data 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 IoT 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.

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December 14, 2017 Read