Environment monitoring solutions
ThingsBoard platform dramatically reduces time to market and efforts to create environment monitoring solutions. Platform is widely used for:
- air quality monitoring in some bigger cities;
- weather monitoring on each continent including Antarctica;
- relief monitoring and seismology alerts/prediction;
- Water quality of public pumps and other facilities;
- Noise level;
Save up to 90% of development time for your environment monitoring solution by utilizing the following platform benefits:
- Reliable and fault-tolerant data collection from your IoT devices and sensors;
- Powerful rule engine to process collected data and produce alarms and valuable insights;
- Advanced and flexible visualization for real-time and historical data;
- Customizable end-user dashboards to share the monitoring results;
- On-premises and cloud deployment options;
- Remote control and OTA updates for your IoT devices;
- Customizable mobile applications with minimum coding efforts;
The platform provides production-ready server infrastructure to connect your IoT devices, store, analyze and share collected IoT data;
Environment monitoring dashboard
The following interactive dashboard represents an environment monitoring component that you may easily embed into your IoT solution. This particular dashboard allows users to monitor temperature and humidity sensors. You may quickly adapt it to Air quality or other sensors and add remote control scenarios.
The live dashboard is part of the solution template and displays real-time data from temperature and humidity sensor collected using ThingsBoard MQTT API. You may use the dashboard to:
- add new sensors;
- change the location of the sensors;
- configure the alarm thresholds;
- browse historical data.
The dashboard has two states. The main state displays the list of the sensors, their location on the map as well as the list of their alarms. You may drill down to the sensor details state by clicking on the table row. The sensor details state allows to browse temperature and humidity history, change sensor settings and location.
ThingsBoard advantages
ThingsBoard supports high-availability deployments on cloud and on-premises data centers using K8S or bare-metal deployments. Platform components are horizontally scalable. ThingsBoard has production deployments supporting more then 500 000 devices connected.
Connect devices directly to the platform via the following built-in protocols: HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, LwM2M, and SNMP. Connect devices in your local network to the cloud using ThingsBoard Gateway via Modbus, BLE, BACnet, OPC-UA, and other protocols.
Connect LoRaWAN devices via integrations with standard network servers like TTN, LORIOT, ChirpStack, Actility, etc. Connect SigFox devices via integrations with the SigFox backend.
ThingsBoard supports industry-standard encryption algorithms like RSA and ECDSA to ensure the data is secure during transfer via TLS(TCP) and DTLS (UDP).
ThingsBoard allows you to define application logic with drag-n-drop rule chain designer. The Rule Engine is a robust and scalable processing framework that leverages industry-standard message queue implementations like Apache Kafka or AWS SQS to ensure data durability and guarantee data processing. You are free to process data with the Rule engine or push it to further processing in external systems.
Visualize collected data using rich interactive dashboards. Develop multi-state interactive dashboards with zero coding efforts and built-in charts, gauges, maps, tables, and control widgets. Customize every dashboard aspect using advanced widget settings or even custom widget bundles. Low latency updates are possible with embedded web-sockets support.
Build your own IoT mobile application with minimum coding efforts using ThingsBoard Mobile Application, an open-source project based on Flutter. Leverage a built-in set of mobile actions to take a photo, scan QR code, update location, and more directly within the dashboard.
ThingsBoard provides UI and API to manage tenants, customers, users, devices, and assets. Single tenant may have multiple tenant administrators and millions of devices and customers. It also offers out-of-the-box support of OTA updates for your smart meters.
Environment monitoring solution overview
The diagram below identifies data flow and integration points for a typical environment monitoring solution that uses the ThingsBoard platform to collect and analyze data from IoT sensors.
You may notice plenty of connectivity options for the IoT sensors: direct connection to the cloud, through the IoT Gateway, integration with a third-party system or ThingsBoard Edge. Most of the environment monitoring projects today use IoT Gateway deployed at the monitoring site. Usually this device is either running ThingsBoard IoT Gateway or using Gateway API. Using the gateway, customers optimize hardware and connectivity cost. You may connect multiple sensors (even using physical wire) to a hub and use only one connectivity module.
Advanced environment monitoring IoT solutions may use LoRaWAN or SigFox devices as well.
The platform supports industry-standard encryption algorithms and device credentials types. ThingsBoard stores data in the fault-tolerant and reliable Cassandra database. The Rule Engine enables forwarding incoming data to various analytics systems, such as Apache Spark or Hadoop, using Kafka or other Message buses.
