Monitoring IoT Sensor Data on InfluxDB Cloud

3 min readJul 13, 2022

InfluxDB is an open-source time series database (TSDB) developed by the company InfluxData.

It is written in the Go programming language for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, Internet of Things sensor data, and real-time analytics.

InfluxDB Cloud is a Time Series Database as a service built as a serverless platform. It is a fully managed platform scalable across 8+ regions on AWS, Google, & Azure that meets the demanding data security and privacy standards.

More info : https://www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-cloud/

In this tutorial, we will see how to write sensor data from Raspberry Pi to InfluxDB cloud.

Step 1: Go to https://cloud2.influxdata.com/ and signup for an account.

Step 2: Select the Provider and region, enter the company name , read and agree to service agreements.

Step 3: Select a free plan as its easier to get started with FREE PLAN

Step 4: Select Python as the programming language

Step 5: Install the influxdb-client module which is a python library for playing with InfluxDB. adafruit-circuitpython-dht is needed for working of DHT sensor

pip3 install influxdb-client
pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-dht
sudo apt-get install libgpiod2

Step 6: InfluxDB Cloud uses Tokens to authenticate API access.

Create a Token and store it as an environment variable

Step 7: Initializing the Client

Here, we initialize the token, organization info, and server url that are needed to set up the initial connection to InfluxDB. The client connection is then established with the InfluxDBClient initialization.

import influxdb_client, os, time
from influxdb_client import InfluxDBClient, Point, WritePrecision
from influxdb_client.client.write_api import SYNCHRONOUStoken = os.environ.get("INFLUXDB_TOKEN")
org = "abc@gmail.com"
url = "https://us-east-1-1.aws.cloud2.influxdata.com"client = influxdb_client.InfluxDBClient(url=url, token=token, org=org)

Step 8 : Write the data on the InfluxDB Cloud

To start writing data, we need a place to store our time-series data. We call these buckets. Create a bucket and give it a name.

The following code sends data from 0 to 4 after having a delay of 1 second.

bucket="temp_bucket"write_api = client.write_api(write_options=SYNCHRONOUS)
   
for value in range(5):
  point = (
    Point("measurement1")
    .tag("tagname1", "tagvalue1")
    .field("field1", value)
  )
  write_api.write(bucket=bucket, org="abc@gmail.com", record=point)
  time.sleep(1) # separate points by 1 second

Note : We can change the code by adding the DHT Sensor code embedded inside this

Step 9 : Connect DHT11 sensor to Raspberry Pi

import adafruit_dht as a
import time
s= a.DHT11(3) #GPIO pin 3
while True:
        h=s.humidity
        t = s.temperature
        print(f"Humidity: {h}% and Temperature {t} C")
        time.sleep(5)

Step 10: Visualization using a Dashboard

Create a Dashboard