Which IoT platform to visualize real-time and historical sensor data?

Question

In order to prepare some tutorials for my students, I am working on a few DIY electronics projects in the field of IoT. I want to use ESP32, ESP8266, Arduino Uno, and Raspberry Pi. I am more deep on firmware/hardware part and I have no experience on cloud application.

I know that there are some IoT PaaS such as Azure IoT, AWS, Google, etc. As I want to develop some simple prototypes, I just want to send the data to the cloud and visualize them without any back-end coding skills and all the mentioned services requires additional expertise to show the data (DB, UI/UX,...).

I googled to find simplified solution and these services popped up:

• uBeac
• TagoIO
• ThingsBoard
• freeboard
• myDevices
• Losant
• thethings
• Thinger

I need to send data via HTTP and MQTT to the cloud service and visualize the sent data.

My question is which service is more suitable for my use case? Is there any other service that I missed? And the more important one: what are the key factors to evaluate such services?

Answer 1

I would recommend NodeRed .Simple drag and drop visual programming by IBM based on Nodejs .NodeRed can be installed easily using npm (package manager in Nodejs sililar to pip for python).Please read offficial documentation for installation and usage.You can install mqtt broker like mosquitto and add mqtt capability to NodeRED.

Thinger.io is also quiet simple.Its an opensource platform that supports mqtt protocol.simple interface to add device, generate security token as well as simple to add graph

Answer 2

Another option is ThingSpeak: https://thingspeak.com/

This platform allows you to send data using http request and visualise in graphic yous sensors. Besides, you can create 'alerts' to send a message when some sensor reach an exact value.

Answer 3

You can use ubidots platform for data visualization.

It provides very good graphical representation of your data.

Answer 4

there are several IoT platform that can visualize data in real time and historical information. Almost all support MQTT and HTTP so they match your needs. They are platforms that are not free while others provide a free account you can use to experiment with your project. Just to name a few:

Ubidots

Temboo

TheThings.io

Xively

myDevices Cayenne

Kaa

If you want to have more information you can give a look at my post at https://www.survivingwithandroid.com/2018/10/iot-platforms-overview-to-build-iot-projects.html

Let me know if you need more information.