The Electronic Barometer

This goes beyond data journalism. It is a project about the Internet of Things, studying the relationship between measurement/observation, data and storing data, and finally retrieving, analyzing and visualizing data if possible real time. Here is the story.

THE ELECTRONIC BAROMETER 3

In part 1 we discussed publishing real time data, in part 2 I highlighted storing data in a database and publishing them on a blog. In the last part 3 of this series I will pay attention to retrieving data from the database and visualizing the query results.

The simplest way to retrieve data from MYSQL is installing phpMyAdmin, which gives you complete control of the database, tables and queries. phpMyAdmin makes building a query and exporting it to .csv very easy. The exported .csv can be used for further analysis with for example Excel and visualizing with Google.

More interesting is to make a direct connection to the database from R, making the query, analyze and visualize directly from R. Finally, I pay attention to publishing these results online with plot.ly rest API.

THE ELECTRONIC BAROMETER (2)

It is nice to read real time the changes in the pressure as an indication of changes in the weather. However, the observations once published are lost.  It would be much better to store the measurements as data in for example MYSQL and publish the data from the database in Wordpress.