What do I do now? (Reading sensors)

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I am new to Influx and I want to use it to save data from a variety of sensors. I am using win10 and have got as far as
C:\Program Files\influxdb>influx.exe
Connected to http://localhost:8086 version 1.7.4
InfluxDB shell version: 1.7.4
Now what do I do? To get as far as I have has stretched my horizons significantly. Any help will be much appreciated

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HI,

Influx doesn’t play well with Windows as far as i am aware. IMO, it’s best to run it on Linux (i use Ubuntu).

Are your sensors SNMP? or do you have the telegraf agent installed?

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While it’s not recommended to run InfluxDB on Windows in production, depending on your use case it might work for you. You can also install InfluxDB inside a Linux virtual machine or run the Linux Docker containers with Docker for Windows.

The next step is to get data off of your sensors and into InfluxDB by constructing a data pipeline, “a set of data processing elements connected in series, where the output of one element is the input of the next one”. All sensors convert some sort of signal in the physical world (temperature, vibration, light, etc.) into an electrical signal, which then needs to be converted into a digital signal, which can be passed from device to device and service to service until it gets to the database.

If you were using a DS18B20 temperature sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi, for example, the pipeline would look like this:

  1. A DS18B20 converts temperature to 1-wire signal, and sends the data to a Raspberry Pi.
  2. Linux, running on the Raspberry Pi, reads the 1-wire connection and converts that data to an entry in the sysfs filesystem.
  3. Telegraf, a program running on Linux on the Raspberry Pi, reads the sysfs entry for the sensor using its temp plugin, and converts the data into Line Protocol before sending it to InfluxDB.
  4. InfluxDB receives and stores the data.

Which sensors are you using? This will determine the specific steps you need to take to construct your pipeline.

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Thanks for all the replies. I am a little disappointed that I could download from the Influx site but there are serious problems running on Windows. I will find another solution

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I’m back. When I last tried to open influx I got a port 8088 busy. I have checked and it appears nothing is connected to 8088. Any suggestions?

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Did you read this page? Running the TICK Stack on Windows | InfluxData

It shows ports 8086, 9092 and 8888 - but doesn’t mention 8088.
And it also states that running the TICK stack on Windows is experimental, at best.

Switching to Linux or finding another solution may be a faster approach.

As far as reading sensor data, I’ve found the TICK stack to be simply amazing. All of my sensors publish their data in JSON format to an MQTT broker.

I had sensor data streaming into Influx, via Telegraf, done in about 10 minutes. And I’m new to TICK.

This is a wonderful system.

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