Storage and Visualization Help Please

Getting Started
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Hi There,

I’m still really new to Particle (slightly less new to IOT). I’ve been working with an argon for about two weeks now. I do have sensor readings published through the GCLOUD Integration and Cloud Functions moving those messages into a firestore database. From there I can visualize them with d3.

So, I have made good progress and I’m satisfied with the platform. I just hope someone can clear up a few things for me so I don’t wind up going down they wrong path as I continued with development.

  1. Why would I ever user Particle.variable or Particle.function. They seem to be complete dead ends; limited to custom code calling ParticleIO endpoints. It seems I can do the same thing with Particle.publish/subscribe. In this case there are many services that I can integrate with not limited to just Particle.

What am I missing? What is the production use case for variables and functions?

  1. So, Particle.publish seems to only be able to publish directly to Particle.IO pub/sub. What is the real value of this service? I can’t seem to do anything with these messages unless I use some other service like Google PubSUB to ingest the messages and then process them. Why doesn’t DeviceOS just Particle.publish directly to the Google PUBSUB Message Queue, and others of course.

What is the actual value of having my messages go to the Particle PUBSUB queue rather than to a service where they can be used directly.

  1. Particle claims to be “THE ONLY ALL-IN-ONE IoT PLATFORM ON THE MARKET” and yet there are no storage and visualization tools. The end of the road that Particle has paved seems to be the message queue and a few challenging integrations. It seems not to be all-in-one at all. For reference, the only thing I really have to compare to is adafruit.io. Where I just publish messages and they show up in dash boards. I appreciate that there are some advanced industrial use cases where adafruit.io seems a toy - in fact that is why I am trying particel. I know there is no such thing as one size fits all.

But, am I missing some features of Particle that fill this gap?

Thanks in advance for any help understanding this.

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