The project
For some time I have been working on gathering information about the indoor climate in our appartment. The project is nearly finished and it seems like a stable platform. Here is an example of the end result of all the data collection:
If you want to get a feeling of what you can do in Grafana, you can have a look at my last 12 hour data here. These are real data: SNAPSHOT
Main structure
Everything is built around an ESP8266 which is a powerful microcontroller equiped with Wifi. It is connected to a wide array of sensors to periodically collect measurements and send them over Wifi back to my collecting server.
The protocol used for sending is MQTT which is a light weight IOT data exchange protocol. The software on my server for communicating MQTT is Mosquitto.
On my server I also have Home Assistant that gets all this information from the MQTT server and stores it in an Influxdb database.
On the very top of everything is Grafana which makes all the nice graphs.
Next
In part 2 I will describe the electronics behind the project.