I finished the previous post vowing to investigate alternative dashboard options, as Blynk had fallen short of expectations. I’ve since discovered ThingsBoard, an Open Source platform for managing and displaying data from IoT devices, and so far, it looks good.

To create the dashboard, I initially worked through the “Hello World” example, creating a simple dashboard with simulated temperature data. The UI presents a lot of features, but is not overly complicated, and I was soon able to set things up to my liking.

While the original code written for the Arduino Pro Mini initially worked with the ESP8266 board, some additional libraries were required to run the wireless on the new board and connect and send data to the ThingsBoard dashboard, so there have been some updates to the code. I worked through some of the starter project code on the ThingsBoard website to get things up and running, and while I had a few errors in the code to work through, I was able eventually able to upload the sketch to the microcontroller.

Once that was done, live temperature data from the microcontroller displayed on the dashboard automatically, as I’d used the same token in the code. From there, adding additional charts to the dashboard and integrating the humidity data was very intuitive, and I very quickly had a result.

This is currently running on the ThingsBoard Demo Server, and so there’s some tidy up work to do. As there’s no way to act upon the temperature and humidity data when outside the range of the wireless network, it’s not necessary to have access in the cloud, so my intention is to set up a local ThingsBoard server so I can have complete control over it.

The microcontroller is currently being powered by a USB backup battery, which is quite unwieldy compared to the size of the rest of the setup, so on the hardware side the next step is to connect a small power supply. Some kind of enclosure may follow but first I will need to test the ability of the setup to connect with the wireless network from inside the entomology box. The network is already running on 2.4Ghz, rather than dual band or 5Ghz, which gives us every chance of success, but I’m prepared for a problem.