

Show HN: Simple Dashboards for Internet-Connected Devices - Bug_Labs
https://freeboard.io

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davidu
This is cool, but I think your description is a misnomer. This is a dashboard
for Internet-connected devices that provide various readings and status
updates.

In my world (enterprise security) -- "Internet of Things" generally means the
connectedness of many things at scale. So when I saw the description I got
really excited that it'd be a dashboard to help monitor a million devices, or
help surface intelligence from the temperature readings of 100,000 sensors
across a farmland. Or 500,000 energy meters. Etc. That's what will be cool
when people figure out how to do. How do you surface intelligence insights and
the data that matters from an avalanche of data coming out of 100's of 1000's
or even millions of devices. :-)

That's a free business idea, because not many folks are doing this yet, and
none are doing it well.

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Bug_Labs
Great point! Freeboard is great for humanizing a single device, or multiple
datasources at a time, but when you get into 100s of thousands of devices,
freeboard can be used to visualize an analytics engine.

By the way, you can use dweet.io to fill that database or analytics enginge to
your hearts desire. Then use freeboard to see what is happening in that
database!

~~~
davidu
Cool, cool. Nice work.

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richthegeek
I am seeing an opportunity for a service that provides the following, and
perhaps it already exists:

1\. A unified source of dashboards/dashboard widgets

2\. which accept data in one or more known and well-documented format(s)

3\. which are largely configurable and themeable

4\. which can be embedded as either a whole dashboard or individual widgets

This would allow that service to manage all the hard work of actually
developing and maintaining the widgets (including stuff like mobile versions,
fallbacks, etc...) and means I could just chuck data at a known config. Or, I
could define my dashboard to go fetch that data and then have it displayed on
the service's (custom branded) page.

Sure there are libraries that do parts of this, but nothing that really
focuses on providing a whole-dashboard set of features and isn't quite
opinionated on both how the overall dashboard should look and how each widget
should behave.

But for now, I'll just keep writing all these widgets myself ... sigh.

~~~
Bug_Labs
Thank you for the feedback Rich.

You can build your own widgets in Freeboard, and once completed, users can
share new widgets directly with each other through GitHub. We are looking to
build a marketplace of sorts as well, populated by the community, and curated
for convenience.

~~~
richthegeek
In my case it's for a CRM / marketing dashboard, so the data is more stuff
like "pageviews over time" or "sales today vs last week".

I'm fairly sure that the actual data is unimportant if the widgets and data
format are sufficiently generalised.

The important parts for me are how style-able the widgets are... seems like
everyone is going for these carbon-black dashboards which isn't ideal for most
of where we want to show it (ie, not a statusboard on a TV)

~~~
Bug_Labs
Understood. One of the great things about freeboard is that it is open source
and you can change CSS, colors or anything you want on your own.

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donkeyd
Because of the lack of documentation I have a hard time trying it out. Haven't
been able to get a JSON source working correctly. Do have to add that I have
pretty much 0 experience with this kind of thing.

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donatj
I can't seem to get basic auth working. I know basic is "bad" form, but we
have APIs we still expose them selves via it and that would be very nice to
support.

I tried both Authorization: Basic [hash] header as well as the even worse
[http://username:password@site.com/api](http://username:password@site.com/api)
and neither worked.

~~~
jheising
donatj, I would expect that both of those would work, but I can check into
adding this as a feature. A lot of times this is actually an issue with CORS.
The API would need to add a CORS header for freeboard.io. Or if the API
supports JSONP, you can overcome this without a CORS header.

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aabalkan
@Bug_Labs, how did you create the video in the home page? How much did it cost
to you? I'm looking for ways to create videos like this and I'm not sure a
professional is involved in this one. So here I'm asking. :-)

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edent
Think I may have found a bug. When trying to load a JSON feed which isn't
behind HTTPS, FireFox blocks it from being loaded on the board:

`Blocked loading mixed active content`

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Security/MixedConte...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Security/MixedContent)

In an ideal world, every cheap IoT device would have an valid SSL certificate
- but that's a long way off. Perhaps your site should try to proxy the
requests rather than relying on the user's browser?

~~~
jheising
Yeah it's something that is browser dependent. I wouldn't call it a bug, but
it is an annoyance. It's a decision we had to make in order to keep Freeboards
secure for customers who don't want their data to be seen. But it does require
the API to be available in HTTPS as well.

It's something we'll have to fix— maybe an option to turn off SSL for the
freeboard, or like you say, create a proxy.

We'll look into it and have a solution soon.

~~~
edent
Cool, thanks.

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dholowiski
Wow. This is exactly what I've been looking for. A dashboard for my 'stuff' \-
which is basically anything as long as it's JSON.

Thanks!

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introex
Looks promising. Stumbled upon one issue: Gauge has Minimum/Minimum labels
instead of Minimum/Maximum

I was also hoping to find WebSocket support. While polling works for a lot of
cases I expect modern dashboards to update in realtime. Especially considering
how easy it is with tools like Pusher, PubNub, Firebase, etc.

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nemof
just a thought, make the examples more prominent. I almost thought I'd have to
sign up just to try it, before I finally got to the "see it in action" bit all
the way at the bottom of the page.

~~~
Bug_Labs
We appreciate the thought and will consider that. By the way, our examples are
all live devices dweeting their data right now.

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deelowe
I'm not seeing any pricing information anywhere. This could be driving people
away. I know I personally hate having to do the whole "try before you buy"
dance just to find out pricing.

~~~
Bug_Labs
Freeboard is in public beta right now and there is no charge. We will post
price information soon, and we will always have a free option, like dweet.io.

All current functionality will remain free. New functionality that we end up
building may fall into a paid category.

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zokier
Is it strictly read-only? It would seem like a natural extension to make this
a complete control center where in addition to monitoring you could also
control your devices.

~~~
jheising
Our core focus is read-only at the moment, but yes, command and control has
been very much on our mind for a while and I think is going to be a next
logical step. Technically you could implement C&C with a plugin right now, but
we want to make it more of first-class feature at some point.

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lazyant
I quickly browsed the GitHub repo but I guess I'm not smart enough because I
couldn't find the requirements/install instructions/faq to try this out.

~~~
Bug_Labs
Hi, you can try it out directly from the freeboard.io website. Just click on
Start Now right on the front page!

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lazyant
I already tried it thanks, I want to know what it would take to install and
play with the (open source) code

~~~
jheising
Check the repository again. I just updated the Readme.md to add some more docs
on loading and creating plugins. Let me know if this helps. Thanks!

~~~
lazyant
yes, it does help, everything's JS, I wasn't going crazy

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jheising
Yeah it's 100% client side.

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pauldix
This looks really cool. I'd love to pair it up with our work on InfluxDB!

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istrutnice
Saw this last night, very cool!

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feralmoan
very slick

