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Posts published in “Science & Technology”

Providing a remote IoT service

Hello everyone, recently I've designed a PCB which reads some sensors and sends the data through WiFi, a few friends were interested so I ordered a few for them but now I'm stuck with the following problem.

My current setup involves, apart from the PCB, a raspberry which runs a mosquitto mqtt broker, home assistant and a cloudflared instance. All of this is so I can monitor and send commands to the PCB through home assistant and mqtt, while cloudflared allows me to reach my raspberry from outside my home.

Now, if I wanted to do the same for them I should buy a raspberry for each of them and configure it in the same way, but they're not tech savvy and it would be a bit overkill for what they need. They just need a way to read the data sent from the PCB, adjust a few parameters and send some commands.

I was wondering what are the options in this case. I don't want to host a server locally, so I was more oriented toward cloud services. Also, something that doesn't require too many manual configuration to add a new PCB/decide would be great. Two options I considered:

  1. A cloud server where I can setup a few VMs (one for each device) and install home assistant OS on each of them. This requires a lot of manual work but would be similar to what I already have.
  2. Azure IoT Central. I didn't know much about this service, but I experimented a bit with the portal and the SDKs and they seem quite interesting: I just need to create a new device on the portal and paste the ID and key in the code, everything else is managed by the SDKs. This requires more rework of the code though.

Do you know of any other option?

submitted by /u/lbranco93
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Small Light/Lux Sensor

Is anyone familiar with a small sensor that can be placed on a display to determine if there's any luminesce emitting from a panel that can communicate back to a PC (BLE, wifi, direct connection)? I know Wiliot is coming out with one eventually but looking for one available on the marketplace today.

submitted by /u/Townshend84
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