I am leaning very heavily towards upgrading my company to V2 and on adding more products to it in the future. Unfortunately I don’t have a device to test with it right at this moment, but I do have some general questions so I can do some planning. Thanks in advance for any help.
Is it possible to connect devices through a “hub/gateway”? Lora, zigbee? From my understanding YES, but through the API. Is this correct?
Is there any functionality on the dashboard (web only is fine) where you can change widgets/Vpins without interacting with the hardware? For instance if I wanted to have a “gauge” show 0% or 100%, is it possible to have another widget where this choice is made, say “high” and “low” which would then make the gauge show the change? (In the original version this was done by sending the update to the device and back again). Hopefully this makes sense!)
Similar to #2. One of the most annoying things with sensors is temperature as one country likes to use Fahrenheit. Is there any ability to create a “calculation” for a widget based on a selection? Obviously calculating temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit. (Again this was done on the hardware before) Web only would be fine too.
These aren’t deal breakers for moving forward with V2, but would definitely be nice to have!
Thanks for your reply. The basic issue we’ve had in the past is that when something was triggered from Blynk it didn’t always “take”. So a user would selection Fahrenheit, but the device wouldn’t get the change, or send it, or something, and the corresponding widget wouldn’t update. I think it was probably due to a poor connection of some kind, but still, it was frustrating for the customer. This was probably made worse as our device was in deepsleep for long periods of time.
Because of that I’d like to limit as much back and forth as possible. So yes I understand that C and F can be done on the device, but if there was a way to do this without the hardware that would be better.
Same thing with the third item. If I could change a widget to a set value without having to go back and forth to the hardware that would be better. For example a customer chooses 1, 2 or 3 in a widget, and this selection changes the result in another widget. No contact with the hardware.
For a different project we are using ubidots and this kind of functionality is available. I understand this is an apple and orange comparison of products, but it’s where this thinking comes from.
Thanks. We already have all of this functionality in the sketch and working. But the more complexity the more issues. We’d like to remove these things from the sketch if possible.
Unfortunately buddy, the Sketch is required to deal with all these operations. But automation can help you in some cases, for example if you add a slider and a button then you can change the button status according to the slider value, so if the slider is 100% then change button to high and if slider is 0% then change button status to low etc… no code required, You got the idea right ?
@iryna_l no problem. We are using it for our high end commercial products. Ubidots has a huge amount of flexibility and features when it comes to an online dashboard. But, no provisioning, no apps, it definitely doesn’t look as good as Blynk 2.0. It’s impossible for one platform to be everything to everyone! Not a negative on Blynk or Ubidots.
@dksmc super helpful, thank you. If you could mention any specific dashboard features that you like in Ubidots, I’d be happy to put that on our development team’s radar for future roadmap considerations. would love for Blynk to be a strong choice for your and other clients’ high end commercial products
@iryna_l honestly it’s hard to think of everything, but a few things off the top of my head
Ability to create white label sub-organizations. So my dashboard is white labeled, but my customer can have their own white labeled dashboard too
Complex calculations on the dashboard so the sensor/device has to do a lot less work
Complex triggers and notifications
Ability to really drill down into the data beyond just the chart on the dashboard
Ability to add and compare any data from any device on any dashboard
Those are just some that I thought of right now. But again, I wouldn’t expect all of this to be available in Blynk, so these aren’t keeping me from using Blynk. In fact I plan on starting with PRO shortly.
@dksmc Got it, again this is very very helpful. Just FYI, we do actually have most of this functionality in our White Label tier, aside from #5. Thought you should know in case you ever consider migrating that commercial project as well.
Instead of starting a new thread I thought I’d just add some further comments on here.
Using only one service would be great obviously. We are using LoRa (and Cellular) for commercial products. Ubidots, Datacake, etc all have easy integration of LoRa devices through TTN (The Things Network), Helium, etc. Is there any plan to have this sort of integration on Blynk?
