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iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2016 7:57 am
by iotSky
Hello,

I am thinking of building an iotCloud for hobbyists. So users will get a link which they can post data to via REST/MQTT and their data will be stored in a database which they can access via a web front end.

Would be super easy to use and would provide a great feedback look for all the hobbyists out there experimenting with iots. Just wanted to see if there was interest in such a thing.

thx
jim
PS: I searched around for one for my personal use and was pretty disappointed in what is currently available.

Re: iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2016 8:02 pm
by jremington
I suppose you have already looked at data.sparkfun.com. What don't you like about it?

Cloud data storage certainly has its uses, if you don't care about privacy or security.

However, a couple of minutes spent glancing through data.sparkfun.com convinced me that the concept is pretty uninteresting, and I couldn't really imagine what would make it interesting.

Re: iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:10 pm
by pconroy
I'd be curious to know what you found lacking in AWS? REST/MQTT, several persistence options. I'm not plugging AWS or defending it (and I don't work for Amazon) just, again, what did you not like?

Re: iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 1:52 pm
by iotSky
I actually like AWS IOT. I was thinking of building something simple on top of that. So all the hobbyist had to do was point his/her messages to an endpoint and then they log in to see their data. Under the hood I would route the message through to something like redshift or so...

It would just make things a whole lot simpler for hobbyists by not having to worry about the 'cloud' part...

Re: iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:45 am
by pconroy
Ah! Ok. In that case I agree!!

I've found AWS IoT a bit of a hurdle, if you're just trying to get something IoT up and running, slogging through the AWS configuration overhead is a chore. More so for an AWS newbie.

I'm also trying to understand the pragmatism of Thing Shadows. I'm updating my IoT Light Bulb code to plug into AWS IoT and I'm not sure how the Story will End. It appears to be one of those things that I'm just going to have to play with - a lot - to see if I think it's valuable.

I get the idea, I'm just not convinced of it's value. Yet.
Right now, it's a Solution in Search of a Problem, for me.

Re: iot cloud for hobbyists?

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2016 12:09 pm
by iotSky
thx for the feedback.

i wanted to play around with AWS Iot as well, so i'll whip up a simple project to do this and see how it goes.

FYI, the shadow is primarily to store state. So in case of ur light bulb, u can store on/off state tot he shadow. If u want to control it from ur phone, the phone will ping the shadow registry to get the latest state and then update it to off/on as the case may be. The shadow state will then get synced with the device, which can then take appropriate action.