My project would be to monitor to monitor our two boats at our marina. My plan is to use two Raspberry Pi’s in each boat and attach either Grove or Tart (wireless) sensors to my Pi’s. I would like to collect the data from each Pi on the sensors attached to it and send this to my home server. I’ve recently discovered Cayenne and I’d like to understand it better to see if it might be useful for this little home project.
Does Cayenne install on each Raspberry Pi and send the data collected from the sensors to a Cayenne cloud type service for display?
Would I be able to install a Cayenne type dashboard server at home that would collect the data from each Raspberry Pi for my dashboard display?
Will Cayenne work with Tart or Grove sensors. I did notice that Cayenne only works with certain sensors. What is your limits on the types of sensors used? Is there something I could configure with Cayenne to register my Grove/Tart sensors?
Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Cayenne is being developed to provide a simple, painless, and low cost way to access and control your IoT devices from anywhere. Currently you can access your devices from Android and iPhone apps, or through a dashboard accessible through a web browser. It is that easy.
So in implementation, your Pi or Arduino device is setup to call into a server on the cloud with data updates. This makes your device, wherever it is, accessible to you, typically without having to knock holes in your network, or have a home server for collecting and processing data.
Currently support for devices is limited in Cayenne on the Pi, but support for user drivers will soon be added so that you can interface with the control dashboard through a generic file i/o implementation.
For Arduino, you can already implement custom drivers by passing information to your driver using Virtual registers.
Cayenne also allows you to produce triggers across all your Cayenne enabled devices to implement i/o changes, or even send you a text or email when tripped.
Hook something up, and give it a try, and keep in touch.
Thank you for this reply Craig…I apologize for the delay in replying to your post.
Very good information here. Sounds great!
I appreciated the hard work your team has put into Cayenne and for most people running off of your servers instead of poking holes into their own networks is ideal…I’m a bit paranoid and prefer to roll my own SaaS services on my own hardware. Is there an option, or it is being considered an option to allow users to install Cayenne on our own hardware?
I will definitely test this out and play with it…sounds awesome!
You’re not the first to want a locally hosted server type solution for Cayenne, it’s not available right now but is certainly being discussed internally due to the demand. Definitely check it out and give us your feedback, we should be starting on a round of community-requested features soon and this is really ground zero to tell us what you want as we develop the product.
Should we release a locally hosted server option in the future there will for sure be a discussion of it and an announcement on this forum.
There are a lot of options for privately hosted services in both the Arduino and RPi spaces.
In the past, my problem with them was that they were full of security holes, you often have to punch inbound ports into your firewall, etc. Now if you are just talking about private ethernet or Wifi, then any solution will do.
For me, what Cayenne gives us is easy peasy setup on multiple platforms without worrying about network setup, and allowing us to connect to our devices wherever they are from wherever we are, with confidence that the cloud services are secure.
This is the strength of the Cayenne solution.
I have requested a security overview, maybe something on this would help put your mind at ease also.
FYI… I was on a design team that created our own cloud solution, and the sad thing was, as soon as we even registered site names, foreign bots were running penetration tests on it. The threat is real folks.
Hello @kreggly, I apologize for the delay in responding to you. I thank you for this response.
I can see and value your points on the strengths to using Cayenne from your cloud. It’s not necessarily that I don’t trust Cayenne or that I’m ‘Better’ at securing my local server for serving up Cayenne. It’s more about me owning my data on my servers that’s important to me. It’s the reason I don’t have a facebook account and don’t feel the need to put my personal data in someone else’s cloud. Nothing personal.
It’s also an opportunity to help teach my kids, who will be helping me with this little fun home project, learn how to setup their own virtual machine, how to add in port forward rules, how to lock down our virtual machine to keep the nasties out as well as setup Cayenne, which does seem to be much easier to setup than Blynk.
I will keep my eyes on Cayenne and I do hope that one day your project does allow users the option to install their own Cayenne server.
Thanks again for your comments and keep up the great work on Cayenne!
