Tiny computer systems are virtually out-sized by their very own potential. There’s seemingly nothing they can not do, no matter your business or curiosity. For occasion, do you know you could possibly use a Raspberry Pi or Arduino that will help you maintain crops alive or to help you in making tasty beer and barbecue?
Over the years, my workforce on the open supply knowledge platform InfluxDB has realized that skilled and novice builders can mix a Pi or Arduino with InfluxDB for some distinctive do-it-yourself initiatives.
This article explores 5 thrilling issues you are able to do with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino and InfluxDB, whether or not you are a seasoned developer or a newbie. Hopefully, these concepts encourage you (and possibly supply some laughs) forward of your subsequent tiny laptop and InfluxDB mission.
1. Weather and atmosphere monitoring
The developer relations (DevRel) workforce at InfluxData created the Plant Buddy application, which displays the temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and light-weight for to assist customers’ crops keep alive and thrive. This mission showcases utilizing InfluxDB as a storage backend for a Python Flask server, retrieve IoT knowledge, and use Python Dash to visualise the information. My workforce used an Arduino management board for the mission, however treating a Raspberry Pi as a microcontroller can be easy. You may even prolong the mission to create a software that displays any other aspect of weather and the atmosphere.
2. BBQ monitoring
Several of my colleagues at InfluxData are grilling and smoking hobbyists. But even essentially the most primary BBQ fanatic is aware of that the important thing to an ideal rack of ribs or brisket is cooking at a low and regular temperature. A handful of our builders used Arduino to monitor their BBQ pits. One utilized the monitoring and alerting API constructed into InfluxDB and assigned statuses based mostly on calculating the distinction in temperature between five-minute averages. Anything beneath 0.02 levels each 5 minutes signaled that the meat was stalling. This change produced a “warn” standing, triggering an alert notification despatched on to the developer’s telephone. He may then wrap the meat and comprise the warmth, in the end leading to deliciously cooked meat. Once once more, you could possibly use the Arduino, Seeduino, or Raspberry Pi to observe your BBQ pit and make you a real smoke grasp.
3. Aquarium monitoring
Another Influxer arrange a brand new tropical fish tank and monitored the temperature and filter for alerts towards any irregularities. He used a temperature and a flowmeter to collect time sequence knowledge and write it to InfluxDB. The entire mission used InfluxDB, Telegraf, Grafana, and a Raspberry Pi to automate and visualize the metrics collected from the aquarium.
4. Raspberry Pi monitoring
Templates are prepackaged InfluxDB configurations. The Raspberry Pi template lets you monitor your Raspberry Pi Linux system to gather metrics, together with:
- Diskio enter plugin
- Mem enter plugin
- Net enter plugin
- Processes enter plugin
- Swap enter plugin
- System enter plugin
These metrics shortly and simply guarantee customers that their Raspberry Pi system is working as anticipated.
5. Home brewing monitoring
Another Influxer used Raspberry Pi to monitor the fermentation process of his home-brewed beer to make sure the very best high quality.
(Anais Dotis-Georgiou, CC BY-SA 4.0)
He used a digital thermometer to learn the temperature of his beer with a webcam, then deployed optical character recognition (OCR) to learn the values. Next, he used Raspberry Pi with the open supply assortment agent Telegraf to ship the information to InfluxDB. He additionally configured alerts that knowledgeable him when he wanted to are likely to the fermentation course of and regulate the temperature of his beer-in-the-making. On a associated notice, I additionally used Telegraf to make forecasts about these temperature recordings.
Pi made extra versatile with InfluxDB
Users can create thrilling initiatives with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and InfluxDB to be used throughout varied industries similar to IoT, house automation, and knowledge science.
These examples showcase the creativity builders show when given the suitable instruments and an “open sandbox” to play in. With so many prospects, the one factor limiting the enjoyable open supply instruments you’ll be able to create with time sequence knowledge and Raspberry Pi is your individual creativeness.