Building Dashboards to Monitor IoT Devices

Never to be overlooked is the importance of monitoring connected Internet of Things devices, at both a personal and global scale. You need to know the status of your device; its health, battery, connection status, etc. One way to do that is through a realtime customizable dashboard, enabling you to track, monitor, and visualize your connected devices.

Enter: freeboard.

freeboard is a web-based tool that allows you to build fully customizable and interactive user-interfaces for your connected IoT devices, from dashboards, to consoles, to control panels.

And freeboard now supports PubNub, meaning that you can now monitor your IoT device's health and status in realtime. Apps and connected devices running on the PubNub Data Stream Network can now integrate data streams with the open source freeboard and customize how the information is displayed.

Monitoring is a powerful tool for any IoT use case. Say you have a number of 3G-connected, GPS-enabled, air-quality sensors attached to city-sponsored rental bikes that can track the air quality down to each city block. When in use, these specially equipped bicycles provide real-time location-tagged air-quality data that is used to create a crowdsourced pollution index map for others bikers to use when planning their routes. All that information can be displayed on a realtime dashboard.

Integrating PubNub and freeboard

Both freeboard and PubNub believe in the same core design principles: ease of use, simplicity, and the idea of "it just works." In the video below, Jim Heising, maker of freeboard, gives a brief demo of using PubNub with freeboard. Additionally, feel free to check out the freeboard GitHub repository.

As we become an increasingly connected world, the importance of monitoring our devices will increase as well. Don't be left in the dark when it comes to your IoT devices!