Data recording
More than a place to store device data
Nowadays, almost all Internet of Things platforms out there are basically servers to store information from devices.
From the archive: written in September 2016, when Data Buckets launched and could only record from a connected device. Today buckets also take data from MQTT topics, and dashboards chart hours or weeks of stored data next to the new values as they arrive.
It is quite common to see "IoT platforms" relying on the same Web technology used during the last decade, but now to communicate with IoT devices. In this framework, the small devices just push data to this kind of server with traditional and inefficient HTTP POST requests. Other minor alternatives rely on more efficient protocols like CoAP or MQTT, as they have been specifically designed for IoT or M2M applications.
Most IoT platforms
Conceived just like a data warehouse for storing and displaying the information sensed from our environment.
Thinger.io
Started as a platform for sensing and actuating over devices in real time, something that is missing in many IoT platforms.
In our platform you can turn things on and off from a dashboard, a mobile phone or even a smartwatch, in real time, or display charts plotting information right away from the device. This technology has countless optimizations under the hood to minimize data bandwidth, processing power, code size or server scalability, as the whole ecosystem was written from scratch in modern C++, using multithreaded ASIO for the server side, and not just stock Web servers.
New feature
Data Buckets: storing what devices sense
We are also aware of the importance of storing sensed information in a way that it can be easily displayed and analyzed.
There are multiple use cases that can take advantage of this kind of feature, like Business Intelligence, Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0 or Retail analytics, to mention a few. So today we are releasing a big new feature called Data Buckets, which easily allows storing information gathered from IoT devices.
Dashboards
Stored and real-time data in the same dashboard
We have adapted our dashboards so they can display information from both real-time sources and data stored in Data Buckets.
Polling the server
Refreshing the information by polling the server is not real time, and it is quite inefficient. Our dashboards do not do it.
Buckets plus WebSockets
The initial load is done over the information stored in data buckets, and newer data frames are received directly through WebSockets.
This way we can mix the advantages of stored information and real-time data sources, so the dashboards keep updating instantly. A dashboard fed by data buckets can show, for example, a small meteo device that is logging temperature, humidity, pressure and lux.
Getting started
Recording data from the Console
This feature is available now and can be accessed directly from the Console: open the "Data Buckets" section to start logging data from a device.
At this moment the feature only supports data logging from a connected device, but it is quite easy to configure and modify:
Select the device
Select the resource
Set the sampling interval
We will write soon about newer features and changes that arrived with our Data Buckets, so stay tuned!
Dashboards on stored and live data
Hours or weeks of stored data for charts, and new values as they arrive.
