Technically I started work on my 2016 challenge late 2015. The goal remains to have something tangible done as the year progresses. This brings me to the foundation of all I intend to build: The Architecture.

As a Software Engineer, I deal with Architecture decisions daily. Making best guesses on future design and ruminating on past bad decisions. In the Agile landscape I have come to terms with that fact that Architecture is really where you land and the initial key decisions are around mitigating risks. How much time one puts in upfront architecture decision depends on what you are building: A shed or a skyscraper. In my case I choose to land somewhere in between.

I typically advocate for a factor of 3 to account for the smallest unit of complexity. In this first round I was focused more on simplicity which meant a single node and single broker where possible.

My current tech-stack includes:

  • MQTT
  • Kafka
  • ELK Stack
  • Cassandra
  • 2 Linux boxes
  • Programming language choice - C, Python
  • Sensor Peripherals (Efergy Electricity Monitor and R820 Tuner)

Data Pipeline

Here is my view from Kibana

Kibana Visualization