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Show HN: Simple Dashboards for Internet-Connected Devices

by Bug_Labs on 4/23/14, 2:04 PM with 38 comments

• by davidu on 4/23/14, 2:44 PM

  This 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.

• by richthegeek on 4/23/14, 2:49 PM

  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.

• by donkeyd on 4/23/14, 3:58 PM

  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.

• by donatj on 4/23/14, 4:34 PM

  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.

• by aabalkan on 4/23/14, 6:49 PM

  @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. :-)

• by edent on 4/23/14, 7:51 PM

  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?

• by dholowiski on 4/23/14, 6:43 PM

  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!

• by introex on 4/24/14, 9:35 AM

  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.

• by nemof on 4/23/14, 2:40 PM

  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.

• by deelowe on 4/23/14, 9:13 PM

  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.

• by zokier on 4/23/14, 5:46 PM

  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.

• by lazyant on 4/23/14, 3:37 PM

  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.

• by pauldix on 4/23/14, 7:01 PM

  This looks really cool. I'd love to pair it up with our work on InfluxDB!

• by istrutnice on 4/23/14, 2:07 PM

  Saw this last night, very cool!

• by feralmoan on 4/23/14, 2:41 PM

  very slick