On 19 July 2015 at 22:31, Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
To me, that sounds stupidly complicated when what you're doing is monitoring something!
Can I ask why you think that?
Setting aside the secondary objective (to learn something I can extend into different areas), the primary objective is to get notifications if the freezer power usage goes outside certain ranges.
Somehow, therefore, I need to monitor something and when certain criteria are met I need to get a message to (say) my phone.
I could script something myself (I have played a bit with the data that the CurrentCost devices give me over USB) but that's not really going to be easy to extend and means reinventing some wheels. I could use a typical monitoring package, such as Nagios (which pretty much has "stupidly complicated" as its tagline in my experience!)
What I'm currently suggesting is that I use something which is already capable of sending data into "the cloud" and use tools already there (IFTTT) to validate the data and send me notifications (email, text, or to a phone app (I believe)). There's a massive amount of complex infrastructure involved in doing that I agree, but at my level it should still be just a case of connecting a few building blocks together, and I then have the rest of that infrastructure to play with in the future.
The biggest downside is handing my data over to a third party I have no control over (free beer without freedom), which is why I was looking at FOSS IFTTT alternatives - although it's probably not a bad idea to try out the hosted IFTTT first before trying to set something up of my own (and I'd certainly need a bigger use case than checking my freezer before that was worthwhile).