I have designed a device that sends a bunch of data to a Blynk project via wifi. The device is kind of like a complicated refrigerator. My Blynk project monitors several temperatures from the refrigerator, motor rpm, switch settings, alarms, etc. This all works fine. Cool! This is where it gets tricky. I will be building about 60 of these refrigerators, all identical, and they will be scattered all over the world. I need to be able to access the data feeds from all the different refrigerators. I only need to look at one refrigerator at a time… NOT all of them simultaneously. How can I do this with Blynk?
Option 1: Build one Blynk project for each refrigerator. Each Blynk project has an auth token associated with one refrigerator. I think this is feasible, but not very practical. Building 60 cloned Blynk projects sounds painful (maybe a job for my intern!). And to make things worse, if I need to make a change to the Blynk project… I have to make the same change to all 60 projects (another job for the intern!) Needless to say, I do not like this option, unless there is an easy way to distribute updates to all cloned projects.
Option 2: I might be able to utilize some features described in the Blynk documentation about “Control of multiple devices”. But I think there is a limit of 25 devices. Even if 60 devices is okay, I might need to use one tab for each refrigerator… but Blynk says you can have only 4 tabs in a project, so I don’t think I have enough project space to manage 60 refrigerators. Also, Blynk might not be able to handle all the data coming in from 60 devices. Maybe there is some code or a widget that allows one to simultaneously change the target of all the widgets in a project…, that would be cool, and it might solve my problem. (I will need to switch from one refrigerator to another several times a day. Manually switching the target for each widget one-by-one would not be practical.)
Option 3: I would like to have each refrigerator write to the Blynk server using a different auth token. Then I would like to have one Blynk project that has a table (or menu of some sort) showing all the refrigerators/tokens. Then I would like to pick the one refrigerator/token that I want to look at, and then all the data from that refrigerator populates my Blynk project. This would be an elegant solution to my problem, but I don’t know if Blynk has the tools available to make it happen.
I see a support thread “Support for multiple devices” started by Co-Founder Dmitriy describing multiple tokens as a feature, but I don’t think this resulted in a solution to my situation.
Has anyone else had to tackle this problem? How did you do it?
