How to see sensor data when away from home?

[Rob73]

I would like to be able to see my sensor data when I am away from home. Maybe see the current wind speed, temperature or some other reading. I pretty much use node-red to direct the mqtt messages from all of my nodes and store the data I would like to trend in influx. Some of the data I display on MagicMirror and some of it I use some dashboards on Grafana. I use telegram to notify me when things like the driveway alarm is triggered or the door is locked or unlocked. Telegram is really nice because I can also send a image from the security camera along with the notification.

Sometimes I would like to be able to see some real time data from my nodes. Is there a good way to do this? Is anyone else using an iot cloud service of some sort or some setup like home assistant? Maybe linking the data to google home or amazon alexa services where the data can be seen when away from the home network? I dont know if anyone is doing something like this or if its even possible.


Rob

[TD-er]

Why not use a VPN service which is probably already present on your router?
Quite a lot of modern routers/modems do have Wireguard support.
Then you can install the Wireguard app on your phone and scan the generated QR code from your router's web interface to get the connection data.
With Wireguard it is just as simple as toggling a switch in the app to be connected to home.

Then you can just access all your tools (even ESPEasy nodes ) like when you are at home, without having to share anything with some cloud service or port forwarding to many unsecure devices.

For Wireguard you only need to forward 1 UDP port to wherever Wireguard is running.
If it is running on your router, then the router software will probably do this for you.
And the really nice thing is, you can't scan for open UDP ports to see if there is a Wireguard instance running.

If your router doesn't support Wireguard, you can install it on many other devices like a 20 euro Mikrotik access point and simply portforward the UDP port you pick to it.

[Rob73]

Oh, OK. I will look into that. That sounds like a better option to me!

Thanks for the suggestion!!


Rob

[chromo23]

I would like to be able to see my sensor data when I am away from home.

Personally, I use two options. The first is to send data to thingspeak. The advantage here is that you already have some graphs. I also added support in ESPEasy to collect data from Thingspeak. So you can display data from an ESPEasy device that isn't on the same network or in the same location. https://espeasy.readthedocs.io/en/lates ... sendtohttp.
Since my provider uses CGNAT, a simple VPN is not possible for me, so I created easy2ntfy as a second option.

[TD-er]

@Chromo: Don't you have IPv6?
At least your Wireshark should be able to make a connection over IPv6.

[chromo23]

I have IPV6 and my router is able to run Wireshark with IPV6 support (ddwrt router). But to be honest, I don't understand how to make a connection. I tried it a while ago and failed, and was too frustrated to try again.
I think the problem was opening a tunnel from an IPV4 address, if I remember correctly. But I would really appreciate any helpful insight and if so, I would be happy to try again. I used an openvpn reverse proxy for a while, but it was never very convenient to use.

[chromo23]

But even if I had a VPN, I like to use easy2ntfy because it is very convenient. No need to open a VPN or anything. Just press an icon on my phone for basic interaction. But I guess using this kind of UI is not for everyone (I myself could not imagine a life without easyfetch as a dashboard for ESPeasy anymore. ).

[Affinite]

My Motorhome sends sensor data over MQTT to my home Rpi/Node-Red.
It is stored in a Influx database and displayed using Grafana.
I also pickup the same MQTT data on my mobile phone using an App called "IoT MQTT Panel" - works great for me.

Woops - just read that you want Real Time. My setup reports every 10 minutes but uses less than 1MB per day.
You could of course set the MQTT Publish interval to fairly close to RealTime

[Rob73]

@Affinite, every 10 minutes wouldnt be bad either. I will look into that as well...

I used thingspeak in the past and that was not a bad option. I think it would only let me use 5 sensors or something like that without a subscription.

I am going to try to set up the vpn service. All of the options I have to look into, as they are mostly all new to me at the moment and I do appreciate the suggestions!

Rob

[chromo23]

I think it would only let me use 5 sensors or something like that without a subscription.

Thats right, the free account is somewhat limited. You can only create 4 channels and each channel can have 8 fields. That makes 32 sensor values.
If that's not enough, you could add a second account...
And you always can integrate the data into grafana for a nicer visualisation...

[Rob73]

@chromo23, I should maybe look back into thingspeak as well. 32 sensor values would probably be more than enough stuff I would want to see when away. I have some stuff to work on now.

Thanks!

Rob