While the look of Thinger.io is rather nice, and the widget set for dashboards are quite stylish, functionally they are sadly lacking.
There’s basic facilities that just aren’t there that you need for a proper dashboard. Such things as:
Max/Min over a period - especially good for temperature monitoring, so you can get the highest and lowest temperatures over the past 24 hours, for example.
Compression of values over longer periods - kind of tied in with the previous point: when you have data points every 5 minutes in a bucket it looks good over a 24 hour period. Displayed over the period of a year, though, it becomes a meaningless mess. You need to be able to “compress” those data points into other periods. For example into daily max/min/mean values for displaying in a graph.
Removal of ticks - The circles on the line graphs, when you get a lot of data points, are just messy. It would be fantastic if you could turn them off.
Text widgets can’t scale their fonts - Displaying a longer piece of text (I have the time and date my firmware was compiled so I can check it’s updated OTA properly) takes a massive widget, because the font is a fixed size and absolutely massive. You need to be able to select the size of the font, or for the font to scale to the size of the widget so the text fits in regardless of the size the widget is set to.
thank you very much for your feedback about our dashboards. We know we have been pushing the platform in other internal aspects (not visible for the users), to improve security, speed, and reliability. But now, we are trying to kindly improve the user features. Dashboards requires a review to integrate more widgets, and also work in some aspects like you mention. So, we will have your comments into consideration. Thanks!
I completely agree with majenkotech, The user interface and data logging is a huge selling point and one that may steer our company away. We need to have a good way of monitoring data over the coarse of a year and not just what is live. Thank you majenkotech for laying this out.
How are things coming on the dashboard improvements? As I’m troubleshooting my system, I have a graph set to show the last 2 days, but it would be very helpful to be able to zoom and pan: out to see the last time something happened, or in to a particular event. I find myself sorely missing controls on the graph. One other monitoring project I use is EmonCMS. It has dashboards with a somewhat similar design, but the resulting graphs are able to pan and zoom. The UI is shown at the end of this video, or I could share my dashboard so that you could play around with the graphs to see their options if that would be helpful. https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/setup/emoncms-graphs/. I think their stuff is all open source too.