Data Visualisation with Freeboard.io

Part 1. What is Freeboard.io?

Freeboard.io is a dashboard software that allows you to visualise data quickly and easily. You can visualise data from Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, from maps and from the Internet of Things (IoT), also known as The Things Network (TTN).

Part 2. Other options researched

While Freeboard.io is the service we chose in the end, a selection of other dashboard softwares were researched during the process. These included Tableau, Grafana Labs, Google Data Studio and Bubble.io. From the research and experimentation, the following results below show the software's advantages and disadvantages and why it wasn't chosen.

• Google Data Studio. This software, developed by Google, aims to be an all-round software capable of being able to visualise data from various different sources. The advantage with Google Data Studio is primarily security and the customisation of graphs. The disadvantages are that we can only upload the data through a .csv (comma-separated values) file and that it's extremely difficult to graph the data we want.

• Grafana Labs. This software has various different advantages, such as the ability to choose from a wide selection of widgets and templates. The disadvantage is that it's somewhat difficult to connect the dashboard to the MQTT server we are using, let alone an API.

• Tableau. Tableau is a widely-used dashboard software that allows businesses and companies to quickly create dashboards easily. The advantages include the fact that it's easy to use and easy to create dashboards. The downside is that Tableau cannot collect data from the Internet of Things, and it doesn't allow for custom code in the dashboard service.

• Bubble.io. Bubble.io is a very similar software to Tableau, with many of the same advantages and disadvantages.

The reason why Freeboard.io was chosen as the optimal dashboard software is because of the easy-to-use interface (which we shall see later) as well as the ability to connect it directly with the MQTT server without the need of another server such as IBM cloud. The downsides with Freeboard.io is the lack of customisation with the widgets and the lack of permanent data storage on the dashboard. ?However, these problems are not too concerning and can be easily fixed with simple solutions.

Part 3. Getting Started

1. Creating an account on Freeboard.io

The first step is to create an account on Freeboard.io. The firt step is to go to the following link - http://freeboard.io/signup. Once there, create a username, then enter your email and cretae a safe, secure password. Then click "Create My Account" to create your account.

2. Sign in to your account

Once you have created an account, go to the following link to sign-in to that account - https://freeboard.io/login. Once here, enter your username and password to log into your account. Once logged in, you should see a screen that looks something similar to this.

3. Creating a new Dashboard

to create a new dashboard, enter a name in the text-box located towards the top-right hand corner. Once the name of your dashboard has been entered, simply click the blue button "Create New" and it will take you to a screen that looks like what is below.