Void loop() best practises

[patrickiot]

Hey guys!
Interesting discussion.

To let you know where I went after my Vodacom issues:

I moved away from Blynk simply because I could not afford to commecialise it as an IOT integrator in S.A (don’t get me wrong, its a wonderful project, just too pricey as a commercial version)

I did run my Blynk outdoor sound level monitor and water consumption monitors very well on Blybk for the last few months.

I have moved over to Hassio on a R-pi platform and Tasmota based sensors as the whole thing is free and open source.
Also MQTT is super easy to play with, I have a mosquitto broker running on a VM on google cloud costing $9/month.
I gave up completely using Cellular in S.A, its just not reliable enough but I do use and LTE router as failover from the fibre line here.
Right, very little support and encouragement for IOT devs in S.A., its a shame, but I realise why…not going to say here though!
As for getting our data point to the cloud, Im hoping Satellite-based Lora (Lacuna etc) is going to be a great start for solving these issues./

Happy developing!

[Friedl_Basson]

Hey -

My 2 cent’s worth…

@patrickiot

I moved away from Blynk simply because I could not afford to commecialise it as an IOT integrator in S.A (don’t get me wrong, its a wonderful project, just too pricey as a commercial version)

Indeed. I have tried a couple of platforms but at $1:R16 most platforms are just too expensive to really get going commercially here. I have seen some big corporates cancelling the “Platform side” of their projects due to these costs and simply have the data sent to Google Sheets or similar.

@patrickiot

Also MQTT is super easy to play with, I have a mosquitto broker running on a VM on google cloud costing $9/month.

I used Mosquito MQTT as well until I moved to Particle Cloud. As it is build into the Particle solution, why not. I get it might not be all MQTT has to offer, but for time being, it is meeting my needs.

@patrickiot

I gave up completely using Cellular in S.A, its just not reliable enough but I do use and LTE router as failover from the fibre line here.

Oh no… that’s not good news at all. Have you tried ThingStream? They are suppose to work really well.

@patrickiot

Right, very little support and encouragement for IOT devs in S.A., its a shame, but I realise why…not going to say here though!

Again… could not agree more. Sad… and extremely frustrating As it stands Wifi presents it own challenges i.t.o network failing, no Wifi accessible etc. Was hoping to eliminate some of these with cellular, thanks for the heads up.

Regards, Friedl.