Show HN: Simple Dashboards for Internet-Connected Devices
freeboard.io
freeboard.io
In my world (enterprise security) -- "Internet of Things" generally means the connectedness of many things at scale. So when I saw the description I got really excited that it'd be a dashboard to help monitor a million devices, or help surface intelligence from the temperature readings of 100,000 sensors across a farmland. Or 500,000 energy meters. Etc. That's what will be cool when people figure out how to do. How do you surface intelligence insights and the data that matters from an avalanche of data coming out of 100's of 1000's or even millions of devices. :-)
That's a free business idea, because not many folks are doing this yet, and none are doing it well.
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By the way, you can use dweet.io to fill that database or analytics enginge to your hearts desire. Then use freeboard to see what is happening in that database!
1. A unified source of dashboards/dashboard widgets
2. which accept data in one or more known and well-documented format(s)
3. which are largely configurable and themeable
4. which can be embedded as either a whole dashboard or individual widgets
This would allow that service to manage all the hard work of actually developing and maintaining the widgets (including stuff like mobile versions, fallbacks, etc...) and means I could just chuck data at a known config. Or, I could define my dashboard to go fetch that data and then have it displayed on the service's (custom branded) page.
Sure there are libraries that do parts of this, but nothing that really focuses on providing a whole-dashboard set of features and isn't quite opinionated on both how the overall dashboard should look and how each widget should behave.
But for now, I'll just keep writing all these widgets myself ... sigh.
You can build your own widgets in Freeboard, and once completed, users can share new widgets directly with each other through GitHub. We are looking to build a marketplace of sorts as well, populated by the community, and curated for convenience.
I'm fairly sure that the actual data is unimportant if the widgets and data format are sufficiently generalised.
The important parts for me are how style-able the widgets are... seems like everyone is going for these carbon-black dashboards which isn't ideal for most of where we want to show it (ie, not a statusboard on a TV)
Regarding your points: 1. Currently 13 charting widgets 2. Database SQL query format 3. Configurable and Themable (3 themes so far) 4. Not yet but would be nice...
I tried both Authorization: Basic [hash] header as well as the even worse http://username:password@site.com/api and neither worked.
`Blocked loading mixed active content`
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Security/MixedConte...
In an ideal world, every cheap IoT device would have an valid SSL certificate - but that's a long way off. Perhaps your site should try to proxy the requests rather than relying on the user's browser?
It's something we'll have to fix— maybe an option to turn off SSL for the freeboard, or like you say, create a proxy.
We'll look into it and have a solution soon.
I just downloaded freeboard and I'm running it locally on http, no problem.
Thanks!
I was also hoping to find WebSocket support. While polling works for a lot of cases I expect modern dashboards to update in realtime. Especially considering how easy it is with tools like Pusher, PubNub, Firebase, etc.
All current functionality will remain free. New functionality that we end up building may fall into a paid category.