How to Make an Effective IoT Dashboard without Coding

Not everyone wants to code up a whole interface for their IoT ecosystem. Sometimes you need a quick and easy interface that'll be easy to set up and run. Blynk is that interface! It is a smartphone app which can integrate with a range of systems including Arduino, Particle, ESP8266, Intel Edison, Intel Galileo, LightBlue Bean, Raspberry Pi and more. It allows you to display the values from your sensors and trigger pin responses to turn components on and off. It's a very easy and quick way to test prototypes too. I couldn't find a good overview of how to pair a Particle device with Blynk, so that's what I'll be covering in this article.

If you don't have a Particle device but have an Arduino or other microcontroller, much of the Blynk process should be the same as I explain in this article, you'll just need to put the Blynk code onto the device differently (for Arduino, upload this library).

What You'll Need

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• A Particle Core or Photon
• A breadboard, resistors and jumper wires
• Some LEDs and analog sensors - the Blynk app works with any analog and digital pin signals, so feel free to switch these to use your own components. I've used a potentiometer and a photo resistor.
• The Blynk app - You can find it on iOS and Android.
• Knowledge of how to get code onto your Particle device - see the connecting to the Photon article if you're new to this or this official guide to Particle Core.

My Sketch

If you'd like to follow along with my exact set up (or close to it depending on which parts you have), here is the sketch:

Setting Up Blynk

To begin, open up Blynk on your smartphone (if you don't have it yet, these are the links to the iOS download and Android download).

On first loading the app, you'll need to create an account. That process is pretty simple, enter an email and password and click "Sign Up":

Once you have signed up, you will be greeted with the project screen. Click "Create New Project" to set up your first project:

In our new project's settings, we give it a name and choose "Particle Core" as our hardware model (this is the one to choose if you are working with a Photon too). I've called my project "IoT Dashboard", feel free to get more creative!

You'll see an auth token there on that screen too. Rather than typing it all in or somehow memorizing the whole thing, click the "E-mail" button to have it emailed to you. This is a huge time saver! The email you receive will look like so:

Click "Create" and you will end up at a rather black and empty looking screen. This is where you want to put in all your components. Click the icon with the plus at the top right corner to open up the "Widget Box":

The "Widget Box" is a menu of plenty of different widgets you can add to your project to either control hardware components or read in data from sensors:

To start with, lets create a button that can turn on our LED. Click "Button". This places a button widget onto our project:

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by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint