Advice on Web vs cloud vs app

General
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I’m making a BBQ thermometer and I need some advice. I didn’t want to use an Arduino because I wanted Wifi and I didn’t want to use a Raspberry Pi, cause I feel that it’s overkill. I’ll be using several probes, and possibly an LCD screen and micro SD card for logging the data. Future additions would be to add a blower fan for heating up the coals in the BBQ and a PID to control it.

I’d like a graph of the temp of each probe over time. But what I can’t figure out is the interface. I’d like for the Photon to be able to present a web page with the graph, but I don’t know if it’s too slow.

Here are the options I have come up with:

Photon displays web page (graph,etc.) - I like this option, but would I have to log the data to the SD card and read it every time a web page request is submitted? I’d like to use bootstrap and maybe JavaScript in the web page. But I don’t know how capable the Photon is for that sort of thing.

Photon logs data to a server - I have a web server at home that could capture the data and present he graph. But this also seems overkill.

Mobile app - Photon communicates data to mobile app which displays the graph. I feel like this would be slow since the mobile app would need to request the data since it last refreshed which would be slow.

I’d like to make this project accessible to the community so easy of use is a “nice to have”.

What do you think is the best option?

Thanks,
John

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There are loads of possibilities already discussed in the forum.
Just do a forums search for “graph” - mostly they are using free or very cheap third party servers to log the data and display them multiple ways (including web pages - on mobile devices too).

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That how I'd do it. That's what IoT is about, distributing power where possible. Low power devices as sensors, more capable devices to handle it. A photon is very good at collecting data and transmitting it, while a webserver is very good ad doing web-server-things. Why wouldn't you make use of that?

You could just push the data to the app using Particle.publish();?

@RWB would probably reccomend you to use ubidots.com :wink:

1 Like
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Yea you can have Ubidots up and running in 20-30 mins and then have nice fancy graphs and the ability to send yourself email or text message alerts when the temp goes over or under any certain point. Plus its free so no reason not to try it. I have not seen anything easier to setup yet.

I don’t work for Ubidots, I’m just a happy user of their service and you can’t beat FREE :smile:

There is a Ubidots example library in the online IDE if you want to check it out.