I tried searching the forums but didn’t find a straight answer to my question. I’d like to use blynk to develop a simple app to monitor a machine in terms of temperature and other specs. The problem is that the client liked it so much that now wants to implement in every machine. I’ve been trying to figure everything out, since the machines will go to places without internet, but I can’t wrap my head around the use of auth tokens.
My idea was to have a small ESP8266 board and place it on the machine, monitor it for a bit and then remove the board and place it on another machine. But now, since they want one ESP8266 per machine, how can I develop something with this scalability ? For every ESP8266 an authcode has to be generated and hardcoded, added as a new device to a single account and project and then use the device selector ? But what if multiple techs are trying to monitor different machines? Is the project individual enough that one changing the device in the device selector doesn’t change another implementation of the same project on another phone?
TL;DR: Is it even possible to have a single account and single project to control/monitor several ESP8266 boards?
Setup depends on your need. Right now we have 2 widgets that allows you easily handle multiple devices - this is Device Selector widget and Device Tiles widget.
@lmagalhaes Blynk has tags, tiles, bridge and other features for the sort of thing you want to do as pointed out by @Dmitriy
But the question is how many machines? A handful, few dozen, few thousand?
If it was a up to a few dozen you might want to simply clone a working project a few dozen times (only takes a few minutes). The benefit this has over all the other systems is that all the features will work. There are a few features that don’t work with tiles, bridge, tags etc.
You would simply run along your dashboard checking each of the machines.
They might go in the thousands, to customers with no internet access. And the idea was to have an app that could quickly check (without messing with anything inside) what might be wrong.
Also, the idea is to keep the app on the company side, for example, your maintenance guys go up to the customer and use the app, the customer has no access to this information. It would be really bad for them to be looking for a certain device number among thousands of devices. With bluetooth, this would be really simple since that machine was the only one available and the app would just be a glorified serial port. With wifi, you have to use the smartphone as an AP along with a dataplan to connect your machine to the internet. I’m still trying to figure out if this could actually work in a simple enough manner …
It all sounds like a commercial project and we have solutions tailored for this. Please check blynk.io or email us directly to iot@blynk.cc
Please don’t use Blynk app itself for commercial projects. We constantly update the apps and the server. If we update something and thousands of your devices become unresponsive – it’s not our fault. And we had such issues before… it’s really sad.
Signing up for a plan is the only way to guarantee our service. You will have a dedicated server, your own branded apps in app stores, and of course technical support from us. Also, more business-oriented features are coming to the platform (device management, organization and user management, and much more)
Yes, I ended up on another post with the blynk plant example app and saw your plans. This is just a side project with a nifty little addon that might be a great added value, but it needs to be studied with more care. The machines in question are already on the field, so it has a few deployment issues that needed to be solved as well.
I’ll present this solution as a possible solution and we’ll see how it goes.