Show HN: Simple Dashboards for Internet-Connected Devices
freeboard.ioThis is cool, but I think your description is a misnomer. This is a dashboard for Internet-connected devices that provide various readings and status updates.
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.
We changed the title on your recommendation. We also turned off the voting ring detector so this post would be on the front page, because we want to see original work on HN.
(All: A voting ring is when people get their friends to upvote their posts. This is against the rules; we want stories because they're good, not because they're being promoted. Also, it's not in your interests. Even when we override the ring detector like this, which is rare, other penalties for ring-voting still apply.)
Great point! Freeboard is great for humanizing a single device, or multiple datasources at a time, but when you get into 100s of thousands of devices, freeboard can be used to visualize an analytics engine.
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!
Cool, cool. Nice work.
I'm doing something similar to that with Zabbix. Admittedly not yet to that scale.
But... this could be the front end for Zabbix measurements!
I am seeing an opportunity for a service that provides the following, and perhaps it already exists:
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.
Check out https://telemetryapp.com -- it handles your requirements I think.
Thank you for the feedback Rich.
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.
In my case it's for a CRM / marketing dashboard, so the data is more stuff like "pageviews over time" or "sales today vs last week".
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)
Understood. One of the great things about freeboard is that it is open source and you can change CSS, colors or anything you want on your own.
geckoboard may be able to do all this for you
Checkout www.sqldashboards.com
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...
Because of the lack of documentation I have a hard time trying it out. Haven't been able to get a JSON source working correctly. Do have to add that I have pretty much 0 experience with this kind of thing.
I can't seem to get basic auth working. I know basic is "bad" form, but we have APIs we still expose them selves via it and that would be very nice to support.
I tried both Authorization: Basic [hash] header as well as the even worse http://username:password@site.com/api and neither worked.
donatj, I would expect that both of those would work, but I can check into adding this as a feature. A lot of times this is actually an issue with CORS. The API would need to add a CORS header for freeboard.io. Or if the API supports JSONP, you can overcome this without a CORS header.
@Bug_Labs, how did you create the video in the home page? How much did it cost to you? I'm looking for ways to create videos like this and I'm not sure a professional is involved in this one. So here I'm asking. :-)
Think I may have found a bug. When trying to load a JSON feed which isn't behind HTTPS, FireFox blocks it from being loaded on the board:
`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?
Yeah it's something that is browser dependent. I wouldn't call it a bug, but it is an annoyance. It's a decision we had to make in order to keep Freeboards secure for customers who don't want their data to be seen. But it does require the API to be available in HTTPS as well.
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.
Cool, thanks.
I ran in to the same thing.
I just downloaded freeboard and I'm running it locally on http, no problem.
Wow. This is exactly what I've been looking for. A dashboard for my 'stuff' - which is basically anything as long as it's JSON.
Thanks!
Looks promising. Stumbled upon one issue: Gauge has Minimum/Minimum labels instead of Minimum/Maximum
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.
just a thought, make the examples more prominent. I almost thought I'd have to sign up just to try it, before I finally got to the "see it in action" bit all the way at the bottom of the page.
We appreciate the thought and will consider that. By the way, our examples are all live devices dweeting their data right now.
I'm not seeing any pricing information anywhere. This could be driving people away. I know I personally hate having to do the whole "try before you buy" dance just to find out pricing.
Freeboard is in public beta right now and there is no charge. We will post price information soon, and we will always have a free option, like dweet.io.
All current functionality will remain free. New functionality that we end up building may fall into a paid category.
Is it strictly read-only? It would seem like a natural extension to make this a complete control center where in addition to monitoring you could also control your devices.
Our core focus is read-only at the moment, but yes, command and control has been very much on our mind for a while and I think is going to be a next logical step. Technically you could implement C&C with a plugin right now, but we want to make it more of first-class feature at some point.
I quickly browsed the GitHub repo but I guess I'm not smart enough because I couldn't find the requirements/install instructions/faq to try this out.
Hi, you can try it out directly from the freeboard.io website. Just click on Start Now right on the front page!
I already tried it thanks, I want to know what it would take to install and play with the (open source) code
Check the repository again. I just updated the Readme.md to add some more docs on loading and creating plugins. Let me know if this helps. Thanks!
yes, it does help, everything's JS, I wasn't going crazy
Yeah it's 100% client side.
This looks really cool. I'd love to pair it up with our work on InfluxDB!
Saw this last night, very cool!
very slick