IoT Hobby Project with RuuviTag

Uploading #IoT data from #RuuviTag with #RaspberryPI and nodered in a rural Finnish #sauna - https://t.co/QmYbMNdn03 (at @TheHartsa 's) pic.twitter.com/RidDZKRvjP

— Antti Knutas (@aknutas) May 6, 2017

Figure: Collecting data with RuuviTag and receiving it with Node-RED

Projects with small embedded devices have become a lot more easy in recent years, thanks to affordable and easy Internet of Things devices and more accessible programming environments. Just one year ago I did a small, fun project with a friend after receiving a RuuviTag from Kickstarter. We measured sauna temperatures with the intention of getting an alarm when it was hot enough to enjoy. We used a Node-RED server running on a RaspberryPI device. From there we forwarded the data to the ThingSpeak service for web-based visualization. I should note that nowadays there are more visually impressive services available as well, such as Grafana. It’s open source, too.

I have done earlier projects with devices similar to Arduino and they involving a lot of C programming and soldering cables to ordinary sensor devices. They’re still available and more reliable in some sense, but for some purposes devices like RuuviTag just make everything so pain-free. You don’t always feel like wiring your apartment with new cabling and struggling with C code. Also, the visualization platforms available nowadays are just impressive.