A couple of months ago I attended a workshop on Sigfox, an IoT network provider. At the end of the session, we were generously given the development board we practiced on to continue our experimentations.
The Arduino-based SmartEverything board is loaded with sensors. One of the examples we played with was a simple weather station program that read temperature, pressure and humidity from the sensors and sent that every 10 minutes to the Sigfox network.
It was a nice little introduction, but checking out the result meant login onto the Sigfox backend and seeing the incoming messages as text in a list. I thought I'd try to present the same information in a more graphical way and hopefully make it fun to play with. Here is the result:
How does it work?
The SmartEverything board runs the weather station program. Weather messages are sent regularly to the Sigfox backend over their network.
A Raspberry Pi runs a simple Node.js server that:
- serves the grapher webpage (HTML and scripts basically) to any browser visiting it
- forwards to the Sigfox backend the AJAX calls made by the browser
And finally, the user goes to the Raspberry Pi hosted webpage (which can be on a LAN at home or over the internet depending on how all this was set up/deployed), and the grapher should appear!