Integrating a Real-Time IoT Dashboard

The Raspberry Pi is great for working with sensor systems and controlling actuators in both indoor and outdoor environments. The data can be gathered from local sensors attached to the Raspberry Pi, or sensors connected to a cloud computing environment. Adafruit IO is a system that makes data useful, and it provides useful features to work with your data, such as real-time graphs and sets of UI controls that can be used to either display data from a feed or produce data for a feed on a specific topic.

In this chapter, you will:

• Create feeds and a dashboard with Adafruit IO
• Connect the TMP102 temperature sensor with the Raspberry Pi through an I2C bus
• Get data from the temperature sensor through the I2C with the Pi4J library
• Work with the Eclipse Paho Java MQTT client library
• Publish data to the feed on a specific topic
• Display data on the Adafruit IO dashboard
• Subscribe to...

Adafruit IO

Adafruit IO is a system that makes your data useful and provides easy-to-use, simple data connections. Basic programming is required to work with the Adafruit IO system, which includes client libraries that wrap its REST and MQTT APIs. Currently, Adafruit provides client libraries to work with following programming languages:

• Arduino
• Ruby
• Python
• Node.js

Still, there is no official Adafruit client library to work with Java. So, you can use the Eclipse Paho MQTT Java client to work with Adafruit IO.

You can visit Adafruit IO at https://io.adafruit.com/.

Bill of materials

To build all the projects that will be discussed in this chapter, you will need to have the following things in your tool box:

• One Raspberry Pi 3 (SparkFun part number: DEV-13825)
• One...

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned how to build a sensor-based IoT dashboard with Adafruit IO and the Eclipse Paho MQTT Java client. You can improve this project by adding more sensors and actuators to your dashboard to build a rich IoT application. Also, you can use Adafruit IO to control and monitor your home appliances remotely with a handheld device such as a mobile phone, iPad, or iPod.

Chapter 5, Wireless Controlled Robot, is based on robotics, and you'll build a wirelessly-controlled robot with a Pololu Zumo chassis robot kit. Have fun!