Summary

The architecture and first steps of a new IoT implementation using PSoC 6, CYW43012 WiFi, AnyCloud MQTT, Raspberry Pi, Python, Influx, Grafana, Telegraf and Docker.  Wow, sounds like a lot.

The Story

For quite some time, I have been wanting to replace my original Elkhorn Creek implementation because. … well …, it is old school and a bit tired.  I started an implementation which I called “The Creek 2.0” which used AWS IoT,  AWS Lambda, and MySQL.  I thought it was interesting to learn about all of the AWS stuff… but I never finished the user interface, nor did I replace the Raspberry Pi.  Also, this solution was going in the old school direction and I wanted to use more open source.

So, this time I am going to go all the way.  Here is the architecture:

There are a bunch of things that I have never used including:

1. Docker
2. Mosquito MQTT
3. Telegraf
4. Influx DB
5. Grafana

Which is quite a bit of new stuff.  Almost every time I work on a series like this I do all of the work in advance of writing the first article.  That way I know how things are going to an end and what is going to go wrong.   This way I can fix them in advance of you guys having to suffer with me.  This time, well, not so much, so I am quite sure that there will be some drama.

To this point I have spend a bunch of time with:

1. Learning Docker
2. Trying out Influx DB and Grafana
3. Making Telegraf work

There are still some things which are a bit unknown, including:

1. I don’t like the Telegraf implementation of the mqtt_consumer, which is going to require me to spend time learning “Go”
2. I don’t really know how to expose Grafana to the internet safely (is that going to be OK?)
3. I am considering writing a “Influx Client Library” for PSoC to skip the MQTT?
4. I am considering using “Influx Line Protocol” and not using MQTT

So over the next few weeks we will see how things evolves.  I also decided to purchase a new Linux box for my house to run the system so I will talk about what I did there.

Alan