Golang and time series databases - an explorative journey

Mon, 16 May 2016 18:55:07 +0000

Lately I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about time series databases, which seem to blossom up in various solutions. These types of databases are a nice fit to actually start using these in a small project, I’ve been nursing the last months in my head.

I live in a home with numerous “smart home” devices like netatmo weather-station, smappee energy-monitor, Danfoss Living, Elgato Eve Energy. One thing that strikes me over and over again, is the diversity in how these appliances expose their data. Some of them sure has nice looking apps and web ui’s while other really lack this usability. One thing most of them have in common, is the exposure of some good APIs. Data-points from all these devices are actually just plain time series, which can give hours of fun if accessible in an easy way. This leads me to the small project I will start out in a 3 part blog series; collecting and visualizing time series using a time series database.

As I’m doing this on a hobby basis, it’s important to me that I besides having fun also develop my personal skill set. Therefore I will move into a new language, namely Golang and try out new products like [influxdb][influxdb].

The series will be diveded into the before mentioned parts.

Golang and REST calls
- Learning Golang in this post and getting to know how to communicate with REST endpoints.
Setting up [influxdb][influxdb] and exploring API
- Installation, configuration, API exploration and visualisation tools
Integrating smappee-data into [influxdb][influxdb]
- Finalising the solution and running it on my home server

The final result should be an automated integration from smappee to [influxdb][influxdb] and a simple dashboard in a visualisation tool to show the historis energy usage.

Part 1 will be online in the coming weeks, as I get to learn golang and experiment with it.

Welcome to ...

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 21:00:00 +0000

Hi there!

Welcome to the website, and this first post. So what is this about ?
I could write a lot of stuff about why I’ve started this blog, but for now let us focus on the technical why. To learn something new, I decided to rewrite my website in Jekyll and host it on Github. The result, is what you’re looking at.

Initially, I had a good read here, where the basics of setting you up are described. With an initial scaffold, I kept reading on the official Jekyll documentation and acquired a good foundation.

Basically, Jekyll is a static site generator, which renders a website based on templates. I’ve decided to use the Markdown engine for the the templates. A nice cheat sheet can be found here

To conclude it all, I pushed my site to Github and the result is what you’re looking at.

// Jacob

1p Development ApS

Golang and time series databases - an explorative journey

Welcome to ...