We have recently been working on Obsis , a visualisation platform for raw data gathered in real-time by physical sensors. Initially, the main users of this platform will be from industry, measuring important metrics like machine throughput, operating temperatures and soforth, but we anticipate all sorts of potential uses in the future: everything from monitoring light levels in hotel rooms to electricity consumption in offices to humidity in commercial greenhouses. And with the continuing rise of the Internet of Things, it could be used to keep track of almost anything. Obsis aggregates data sent as MQTT messages from the sensor devices. MQTT is a very simple brokered message protocol that has become something of a lingua franca in this area. We run the open source MQTT broker Mosquitto to read the messages from the hardware and publish them on to listener servers that normalise the message data and store it in a database. These database tables are then r...
