I'm on Retool Cloud.
isensys.retool.com
@Scottsky I hope this gets resolved in the past I would of used Node-RED dashboard for surfacing sensor/iot data both for web & mobile.
But having discovered Retool I hope the trajectory of new features includes richer reporting & visualisation of timerseries data and having an MQTT resource would be nice.
I'd love to have this element there. Short and informative. But with it taking so long to figure why preview on just this specific element I put a good thought what would work in its place. And it grows on me.
As for the project in whole, I was hoping for an ESP32 with some Blynk or Pi with Node-Red but it quickly grew out of hand and became hardware agnostic scientific data aggregator with some sensor logic driven robotics keeping this ecosystem serviced. Never should've let this jeene out. But since it happened Retool has been a great help.
1 Like
As is often the case with scope.
I've never been happy with task/todo list managers.
So I've been building one on Retool and it keeps growing & growing!
May be we start to suggest IoT/OT (operational technology) type features.
Starting with a mobile slider & gauge components.
I've used Node-RED and Retool to bridge the IT/OT divide.
Having IoT connectivity built in to Retool sounds like a good idea.
Definitely deserves a topic of it's own as I would live to dig in to it deeper.
I was imagining borderline of retool would be API connectivity. Maybe webhooks.
And as much as I would want my dash to be super reactive and WebSocket realtimy I'm not sure retool would be able to handle the load.
Meanwhile I'm getting pretty frustrated with preview not reflecting the actual layout of the app.
I don't know how to edit something I can not properly see. Makes me have a phone by that needs retool relaunched to reflect changes. This is too slow to be a long term solution.
Can someone from Retool show me how can I preview my edits on Retool screen so it reflects the way it looks on the phone, please.
Hey @Scottsky, mind sending over a JSON of the app so I can preview on a few devices. Not sure what device specs we use in our web preview, but will look into that as well. Can you also share what device / OS you are using? Thanks.
it's looking very good BTW.
How are you doing icons the new HTML component?
But v.odd that it's dropping the time stamp.
I have seen something sort of similar "string length" ?
Perhaps try shorting test buoy 3 to say buoy 3 to see if renders on mobile.
I don't see any IoT/OT app dealing with streaming realtime data.
For now I integrate the via Postgres .
But all streaming RT data is stored in influxDB and visualised via Grafana
Problem is this is user generated data. I can't be safe from user would enter something long and meaningful. And shortening name to 8 symbols is sooo 90s =) (almost want to make em name assets no_spases ALL_CAPS)
If you are talking 
- it's ascii symbols.
Other icons are hand drawn images I just insert as <IMG> tag.
I was thinking of having Database as a water-barrier between real-time world and Retool, but the need of bi-directional communications and up to 1 hour lag of my satellite downstream keep me actively looking for alternative solution.
MQTT would be my choice for bi-directional coms I've got it on my notional backlog to look at using MQTT.JS via pre-loaded libraries.
BTW EMQX is the best broker I've used.
They have free tier on their serverless service, it's hosted in USA but latency has Not been an issue for me https://www.emqx.com/en/pricing
Using MQTT.js blog
https://www.emqx.com/en/blog/mqtt-js-tutorial
MQTT was the best option by far.
I was considering deploying brokers on survey sites on some pies. Just to have an option to store messages locally until uplink is back up. But was not allowed extra hardware in the ecosystem.
With this being said I added some MQTT client functionality to latest asset firmware. But it's not connected to anywhere just yet. At the moment no asset within stable LTE coverage so can't test it right now.
Another realtime solution I use in Retool-ish is opening an iframe to a bootstrap deployment of navigating interface on the asset itself. Bandwidth hungry, Works great to manually steer the uni, but hard to pass data to retool out of it.
I don't know anywhere near enough about your usecase, but maybe you could set up a webhook to a retool Workflow?
Then your retool app from the client side can set up a REST resource (or javascript query) that writes periodically to the webhook -> which invokes a retool workflow -> which could write to a retool database -> which is then accessible to your retoolapp or whatever else you need.
The workflows are very easy to use.