RuuviTag in my lab - best platform for setting up monitoring?

Hello!
I am an absolute beginner!
I am a new university professor and have just purchased some RuuviTags for my laboratory - I work with materials, and want to monitor temperature, pressure, humidity conditions and possible movement in a few different lab spaces that I have. One of my colleagues at a different institution has some in their lab and has had them programmed to report and log data that can be accessed through an url.

Could I get some advice on the best way to do this? Ideally, I’d like to view this information from my office or remotely. Is getting a Raspberry Pi situated in the lab, and having it interact with the tags the way to go? Assume very basic coding skills, but super willingness to learn. Lab spaces have access to WIFI and I have a windows desktop in there too.

Thanks for reading!

A Raspberry Pi 3 in the lab is probably the best way to go right now, as it even has builtin Bluetooth for listening to the tags.

For a relatively simple setup you can take a look at this post about the RuuviCollector, that setup can be entirely run on a single RPi, or it can be “split” so that the RPi only runs the collector and collects the measurements from the RuuviTags and sends them off to another server depending on your needs. Here is an example of the above setup in AWS. My own setup is similar to that, with the difference that I run mine on my own server rather than AWS.

For remote access, a “split setup” is probably the only way to go, depending on the network setup at your lab, it may not be possible to access the RPi “directly remotely”. That is unless your university/lab network has a VPN of some sort that you can connect to remotely and access networked devices from there, or some other solution available.

If you instead want to code your own setup to collect and process data, the ruuvitag_sensor Python package is a good place to start.

Absolute minimum setup time and cost for RaspberryPi zero W image can be downloaded at http://mybeacons.info/RaspRuuvixxxx.gz.
Flash it to a 32GB SD card add power and configure wifi (wpa_supplicant) and you’re up. details at Monitoring on Pi Zero W with multiple RuuviTags

You may want more power (especially for the database)

I have two RPIs in different houses. I want to collect data on a server in the cloud. I use a linode server to other stuff so that’s now where I have grafana and influx installed. Grafana-> influx datasource is working but I cannot get the collector to add data to the influxdb online. I have tried all types of urls to the server and ports, it wont go through. The setup is very similar to this AWS @bostrom setup but I cannot get it to work. Are there any restrictions with the url for the influxdb? have tried with and without auth. nothing works…

the influxdb will answer pings from RPIs browser. https://www.xxxx/services/influxdb/ping?verbose=true

@Scrin and @dgerman Thank you for your detailed replies to my beginner questions!
I will definitely follow your advice and take a look a those linked posts, and read-up on a Raspberry Pi configurations. I’m excited to get this set-up!
Cheers!

If your InfluxDB responds to the ping endpoint at https://www.xxxx/services/influxdb/ping?verbose=true, then your base url for InfluxDB seems to be https://www.xxxx/services/influxdb which should work when specified as the influxUrl in the config.

If that does not work, check the logs of RuuviCollector, it may be a permission issue (wrong user/password if you have authentication enabled)

where can I find ruuvicollector logs? in var/log there are no collector logs what I can see? are they some where else?

The collector writes its logs into the standard output, so it depends on how you have it set up

@Andre_Norrback
1)How do you start RuuviCollector?
1a) Are you using /lib/systemd/system/ruuvicollector.service ?
If so post it’s contents here.
1a1) If you are, post the contents of the ExecStart destination here.
1b) Also post output from
systemctl status ruuvicollector
1b) If you don’t use systemd post your startup script here

2)Where (if anywhere ) does your /etc/rsyslogd.config or /etc/rsyslogd.d/xxx send daemon.info or *.info
2a) If not add something like

 daemon.info	      /var/log/daemon.info

AND
sudo touch /var/log/daemon.info

Then stop and restart RuuviCollector since it only logs messages at startup or problems.
You should expect
DEBUG [Config] Config: /home/pi/RuuviCollector/ruuvi-collector.properties
DEBUG [Main] Starting scan with: [hcitool, lescan, --duplicates, --passive]
DEBUG [Main] Starting dump with: [hcidump, --raw]
INFO [Main] BLE listener started successfully, waiting for data…

we got it working, configured the other end so it answers directly on the url without /servicec/…

So I got it working when configured directly to www.xxxxxx.com:8086 without the /services/infuxdb

thanks @dgerman , i’ll try that anyway to learn.

/Andre’