There are many IoT dashboards out on the web, most will require network connection to a server far far away, and use non standard protocols. We will show how to combine free software tools and protocols from the worlds of IT monitoring, Industrial control and IoT to create simple yet robust dashboards.

Modbus [1] is a serial communication protocol developed in 1979 for use with programmable logic controllers (PLCs). In simple terms, it is a method used for transmitting information over serial lines between electronic devices., it’s openly published, royalty-free, simple and robust.

Many industrial controllers can speak Modbus, we can also teach “hobby” devices like Arduino boards and ESP8266 to speak Modbus [2]. Reliable, robust and simple free software Modbus client [3] will be used to acquire the metrics from our device, then the metrics will be collected [6][7] and sent to Hawkular and Grafana [8] to store and visualize our data.

(*) http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bocce

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modbus [2] https://github.com/yaacov/ArduinoModbusSlave [3] https://github.com/yaacov/node-modbus-serial [6] https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-python [7] https://github.com/yaacov/hawkular-client-cli [8] https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-grafana-datasource