Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Dope. Although I think your pricing is high, but so is looker and tableau...

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What would be cool is dynamic dashboards that are launched via QR codes. I am specifically thinking about the cannabis industry:

A few years ago, I was making cannabis labels - which are regulated as to what information you must have on the label, and what I did was a QR code that went to a bit.ly link that then directed to the lab results for the cannabis as it was tested.

This allowed for me to scan a QR on a package, be taken to the lab results and also have interest tracked to the product by just counting who and what was scanned - where and when...

The point is, that it would be interesting to have a QR generated for every dashboard such that if I put a product dashboard up, and printed the QR on whatever product, I could then be taken to that board with a scan of said QR.

This would allow for IRL metrics to physical products and track how many scans happen... and a QR could refer to a custom board based on a variety of inputs...

This is a really cool use case! Especially with for environmental and ethical conscious brands.

We sort of do the same thing with QR codes in a factory at the moment where we trace production batches, stock management and R&D test data to link the label factory items back to the MRP data and dashboards. This was implemented using Lowdefy [0] - interestingly we also started Lowdefy out of the need for customer facing dashboards and have since widened the scope into a range of other things aswell.

This is a really cool use case! Especially with for environmental and ethical conscious brands.

We sort of do the same thing with QR codes in a factory at the moment where we trace production batches, stock management and R&D test data to link the label factory items back to the MRP data and dashboards. This was implemented using Lowdefy [0] - interestingly we also started Lowdefy out of the need for customer facing dashboards and have since widened the scope into a range of other things aswell.

Explo looks really cool! Congrats on the launch. I would love to see some videos on creating dashboards especially filters etc.

[0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

Wow the QR code resurgence is real! I'm curious why you chose to support data sources such as Mongo and google sheets first as oppose to others I saw that were coming soon (Postgres, MySQL, etc) and challenges you experienced building out the connections. Looks like we support a completely different set of databases.

And is your data pulled directly from your MRP system or loaded into another database first?

And we'll definitely be adding more examples and videos creating and embedding dashboards in Explo.

Although we currently support MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and Amazon Redshift, SendGrid, Http requests, Google sheets and S3. We started by building apps with MongoDB and the aggregation framework really allowed us to do more and more complex things ito data analytics which I doubt one could pull off in SQL. (I'm no SQL expert, so forgive me if I'm wrong). Our Lowdefy operators and application schema also took a lot of inspiration from Mongo's query language.

We usually deal with less than 100k records, scaling has mostly not been an issue for us, and in such cases we can run the analytic aggregations directly on the MRP read replica [0]

We built Lowdefy so that we can build better, more flexible, quality apps faster for customers. Then decided to OS it.

Lowdefy is designed to work any number of connections, so we'll be adding as we grow. Also, we prefer to not add a "thin" connection, but rather build out a well scoped and tested connection - this can be tricky, not sure of this is the best approach ito marketing as we have an extensive list of connection requests we would like to get to [1]. We'll start to prioritise these more in the near future. We'll also finalise module federation for connections, which will enable custom connections.

[0] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/read-preference/#std-la...

[1] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy/discussions/309

That is cool use case for customer facing analytics/information!

Every part of what you described other than the actual QR code generation is possible today! For each user input in the dashboard, URL parameters can be defined to default the input to a specific value on page load.

Your point around using the Explo dashboard to show more information is super relevant to one of the longer term ways that we are thinking about our product. Rather than just typical "dashboards", what we've built with Explo is a way to create user interfaces that share and communicate data. And we want to take it a step further since we've realized that a lot of web development and user interfaces is really just visualizing and communicating data.

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