Part 1
This year on the 28th September, the Ipswich Makerspace is holding a free open day. This is a chance for people in Suffolk, North Essex and surrounding areas to come and find out what being a member offers.
There are going to be various displays and talks, and I have booked a desk to do a display based around a Raspberry Pi and the Internet of Things (IoT).
For my display, I’ll be setting up various sensors and switches and an interactive dashboard. This will show the temperature in the main room and the temperature in a remote room, and allow a light and fan to be controlled.
The first component I needed to sort out for this project was an online Dashboard. I had a few options, host the dashboard on the Raspberry Pi, or find an online service to host it for me. In the end, I opted for the latter as this would take the load off the Raspberry Pi and free up resources for other work. So I set to work looking for options as the services I used to use in the past have all gone premium with no free options.
After a bit of Googling, I found Cloud4Pi.io. This freemium service offers up to 10,000 packets a month to be sent to and from their service. This is plenty for what I need, so I followed their instructions and installed their services on my Raspberry Pi 4B. Within 10 minutes I had a sample dashboard up and running and showing some basic data from my Raspberry Pi.
In part 2, I will discuss adding a temperature and humidity readout to this dashboard.