Visualizing sensor data on a webpage with Wolfram Data Drop

Hi Everyone

I recently saw this https://datadrop.wolframcloud.com/ which seems to have quite some room for experimenting with visualizations. I was wondering if anyone has managed to send data from his particle device to the Wolfram Data drop cloud. Looks promising, I was wondering if has someone tried this.

Given that I work in the field of interface design I am very much interest in pulling data from the particle cloud into a webpage, and use html/css to style a modular system/dashboard for my in-progress mini home automation system. I would also use the Wolfram data drop to provide visualizations of the incoming data systems.

Unfortunately I have no coding background at all apart from some basic html/css, and a little bit of Arduino. I am happily working my way through it! I have gone through this tutorials Tutorial: Spark Variable and Function on One Web Page and I really find it hard to follow the discussion.

As soon as I have the html files ready I will open a new topic and share the html code for further input / suggestions / collaboration on the project. I am sure that after styling the html file I will have a great difficulty implementing the necessary JSON scripts.

In any case, I am attaching a draft first design of the interface. Will be optimized for mobile of course, but would run nicely on any desktop and give any data junkie some pleasure.

Would love to add wolfram data stats in here.
Thanks!

John

I think you can post your data to wolfram by using their https://www.wolfram.com/datadrop/quick-reference/web-api/

You could trigger this url with a webhook. See Introducing Integrations

Then when your data is in wolfram cloud, you can display it with your nice interface

Thank you for the reply Fabien

I am going to try to dive into the programming required to use webhooks etc. It should not be very difficult to understand the logic, but as I said I have no programming background, and coding is not my thing. However I am willing to try once again.

I am actually looking for the simplest way to visualize variable readings from multiple devices into a web page and style this with html/css. Not something different than a dashboard for the several photons I get data from around the house.

I do not know if the safest / most compatible way to go is through webhooks, javascript, or the tutorial I mentioned above by Brian Ogilvie. I believe that I should get started on a programming language. Or create the html version and complete the full specs of my little project and ask the community for directions on how to approach the problem. And then learn by mistakes.

Thanks very much for your time again.

John

@JohnPixle - I’m also very keen to get into this, given the great data processing power behind the scenes, so let me know if you find out anything.

I thought, given that ThingSpeak has a library, that it might be east to modify this, perhaps the legendary @peekay123 knows this off the top of his head!

I’ve got a set of data, auto uploading from my Solar Powered Particle to ThingSpeak, but I’d like to get some in-depth analysis of the data (e.g. time series for daily patterns on solar power activity for %battery charge and %battery charge).

Let me know if I can help at all, or if you get anything through this. I imagine, based on your previous messages, that the webhook would work the best, to POST data at certain intervals, from the Particle. I’m no expert here as haven’t needed to use the Webhooks in any projects of mine, so it would be a learning curve for me as well.

Current view of sensor data… with little analysis, just draw a graph of the latest 350 data points.

Chat soon. Thanks.

@neal_tommy Hi there. I am totally unfamiliar with APIs and web stuff. Although I make my living designing websites and apps I have never coded anything apart from html and some C. Now, regarding the Wolfram API, I do not know where to start from with this code, it is too much for me to consume. Let’s say I want to send the reading of my temp sensor to the wolfram cloud. Where shall I start, wolfram-wise…

I have asked for some help from my business partner who is a wordpress developer and familiar with all this. I am now learning this, and just recently got my photons and managed to publish data in the cloud.

I am amazed by the possibilities, really. I am very interested in combining computational power from Wolfram and UI dashboards for data reading.

I will let you know if / how / what I try with this. This is also going to be exciting: http://www.wolfram.com/data-science-platform/

Cheers
John

btw, thanks for ThingSpeak, I had not checked it. Looks interesting.
What solar panels do you use for your particle? Very interested in this as well.

Cheers

I bought a small solar cell, I think about 3W, 6V, as in the picture attached. To be honest I think I should have gone slightly bigger as this one pretty much only charges in direct sunlight (I think the PowerShield has certain minimum voltages). Saying this though my battery remains +80% charge pretty much all the time, so it does work fine.

This then connects to the Powershield from Particle, which has included in it a battery monitor which outputs 3 variables; battery %, battery voltage and an alarm trigger. I upload the first two to ThingSpeak, without the use of webhooks as there is already a ThingSpeak library on the Web IDE, so you just include that and call a couple lines of code.

Essentially my Photon is in deep sleep for 15 minutes, then wakes up, connects to the wifi and uploads two pieces of information, afterwhich it goes back to sleep to save power. Here are a couple of photos of the finished 3D printed enclosure I had made:

Would still be interested in the Wolfram DataDrop service, and to see whether their graphing capability and data analysis are better.

Hope this helps.

Neal.

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Thanks, this helps a lot. Will try getting my hands on something similar.
I will let you know if I come across something interesting with Wolfram.

Thanks!
John

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