Cellular Nb IoT

@solar4syv

For me, it's all in kind of what you want to do... I have had a few things I had as IOT type devices and never used the Dashboards myself either. I used Dweet.io a lot for data routing from and to my devices from my computer.  On a GPS nav bot, I did a back in 2014/2015, all the data was Dweet'ed back and forth from an RPI on the bot to an Android tablet. I had a simple control and monitor Android I had written that sent the data to and received the date from the bot via Dweet.io.  (This made it a lot better than my first gen nav bot that needed a wifi router and a notebook computer with TCP connections too it!)

Dashboards would probably be useful if you just wanted to have a quick look at remote data points like temps, humidity, etc with some trending type graph. I think most of those type sites you can "subscribe" to the data and pull or get it pushed to you outside the dashboard interface. 

For me though, Dweeting was the easiest and most flexible way.  I have even used it to send IP address of IOT devices for remote connection or communication. 

What do you want to do with IOT?

Hope this helps,

Scott

@triform

Thank you Scott. I want to set up a public dashboard so the non-profit I am working with can "show off " the usefulness of the solar refrigeration trailor to current and potential donors. It wish to display data such as outside air temperature, inside temperature, solar irradiance, etc. on an easy to understand dashboard. I have all of the sensors working and am connected to Hologram Io but I don't understand how to get it to a dashboard such as ThingsBoard. I have done a great deal of homework but am still baffled by terms such as web hooks, space bridge, and gateways. I just recently learned the basics of C++ do I need to learn JSON also? I am really baffled.

@solar4syv

JSON is not hard to use and I tend to like it better than XML and most of the REST API's use it now.  There are a lot of libraries for JSON so you can usually use one of those to get to the data. For all of my C interfacing with DWEET, I wrote a small JSON to array function.  In python, I use the json lib that comes with it or if it's really simple data, just split the string data returned from the call.

Webhooks are usually used in the IOT context as a PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE method.  Gateways in the IOT sense are usually a MQTT service and can be used in a similar way as Webhooks.  MQTT is a publish/subscribe messaging protocol.  Gateways can also link you to some sort of cloud services like Azure or AWS. 

All a lot of buzzy mumbo-gumbo I know.  I roll my eyes sometimes 😉

Scott

Posted by: @solar4syv

I just recently learned the basics of C++ do I need to learn JSON also? I am really baffled.

Just for the record C++ is a programming language.  JSON is a data interchange format.  JSON can be used by any programing language.  

Think of JSON more along the lines of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).

Of course JSON is not a replacement for ASCII. JSON formats data on a higher level.  But the bottom line is that it's just a formatting standard.   If you have data that is already formatted in JSON, then it would be silly not to use JSON to access it.   Also, if you are trying to interact with an application that uses JSON then using JSON format is basically mandatory if you want to exchange data with that application efficiently.

You should be able to learn JSON very quickly and use it effectively without a steep learning curve.  C++ on the other hand is a very complex programming language and there is far more to be learned about C++ than about JSON. JSON formatting can be used by C++, Python, C#, VB, and pretty much any programming language.