Performance

The data in the mentioned application can be accessed in 3 areas:

1. PlatformIO

During the implementation phase of the project, the data received from the microcontrollers and cloud system were accessed in the terminal of VSCode thanks to the platformIO extension. The location of the terminal window in VSCode is as follows:

When the button is pressed in a client module, it will be visualized in the Arduino terminal as follows:

Similarly, if the data is received from the cloud, it will be indicated in the terminal, which will confirms the data transfer between the MQTT broker and the cloud based system. The terminal update on receiving a data from the cloud is as follows :

This will confirm the updated refresh rate received from the cloud, in the arduino terminal.

2. Node-Red Debug

The data received from the MQTT broker in the cloud-based Node-Red platform can be accessed using the debug node. The data can be accessed using the MQTT receiver node and will be listed in the debug window of the node-red. The debug window can be located on the right side of the Node-Red platform.

The data received in the Node-Red debug node is as follows:

This helps to correlate with the data send and received through the MQTT network. The data will be listed along with the quality of service, message id, topic and the time stamp, and can be easily saved in any database to perform further analysis.

3. Node-Red Dashboard

The Node-Red dashboard can be used to visualize the data received from the nodes. It can be used to communicate the change rate from the cloud platform to the MQTT broker and then to the microcontrollers. The dashboard acts as the User Interface for the entire application and can be accessed in various web-based as well as mobile applications.

The simple interface and access control of the dashboard makes it convenient to be used in various IoT applications without much effort from the developer. It can be configured according to the application and can be integrated with various third-party user interface applications to improve the visibility of the data.

In the current application, the trigger data from the push buttons in the client controllers will be mapped in a time series bar chart to study the engagement of the switches. The data visualized in the dashboard window is as follows:

This can be used for visual representation of the data as well as a medium to communicate the change rate into the MQTT system.