Last Updated on 15th November 2023 by nightowl
I have recently been learning the ropes of a time series database called InfluxDB and a data visualisation tool called Grafana. My goal was to get my all-sky-camera to send its data to the database and have Grafana visualise it and then somehow get the visualisation published here on my website.
Getting InfluxDB and Grafana up and running in docker containers on my NAS and having them talking to each other was fairly straight forward. Also the InfluxDB Python client was fairly easy to implement on my all-sky-camera to send its data to the data base.
I didn’t want to expose the Grafana server to the public mainly to keep the amount of data queries under control. This made sharing the dashboards I created a little tricky. Thanks to the Grafana Image Renderer plugin I was able to render the panels into images. With a simple python script I could then periodically render the gauges and graphs and merge them into a fresh dashboard every 5-10 minutes and upload it to the web site with ftp.
To get WordPress to display a dynamically updated image I had to use some php code snippets and html meta tags. All in all there was a quite a few hoops I had to jump through but I learned a lot and I’m quite pleased the way it turned out.
Here is the live Weather Dasboard.