Re: Power BI / custom hardware project question

TheHydra · ‎09-20-2023

Hi all,

I figured that the Developer forum may be the best place for my enquiry, so my apologies if this is incorrect!

I'm a recent AI Masters degree graduate and I'm looking to set my own business up. The problem that I have is that there's quite a dizzying array of software/hardware setups out there for differing tasks and I'm a bit confused as to what sort of setup I could use. My course focused mostly on the coding/software aspects of AI and data science and so I'm fine with that, but the hardware that we used mostly belonged to the university and we weren't exposed to the workings of it much.

What I would like to do is to supply small to medium-sized firms with environmental/carbon monitoring and reporting capability with the ability to process data in real-time and output to a dashboard using Microsoft Power BI Pro (or Premium). The idea is that it would typically pull data from on-site smart energy meters, water meters and such. Also possibly some kind of IoT weight sensors on waste bins to monitor recycling and waste disposal metrics. The idea is that the company's carbon footprint could be constantly monitored and then its annual carbon report could be one-click formulated from a custom template.

What I am wondering is if anybody might have any thoughts (or experience) on using something like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi for this kind of task, and whether it may be suitable for a setup of this type? I would rather be able to set up an Edge device to take care of data processing on-site rather than solely in the cloud, for reasons such as reduced latency, data security and reduced cloud costs. I have seen a video on YouTube of a chap running real-time temperature and humidity data from an RPi to the Power BI cloud service via the Azure IoT Hub so I know that it can be done, but I wanted to try and understand more and possibly get some feedback from the lovely people here!

Has anybody had any experience of similar or comparable applications who could possibly give me their thoughts on this, or a little bit of advice?

Thanks in advance to anybody replying, I really appreciate it!

K

lbendlin · ‎09-22-2023

The idea is that it would typically pull data from on-site smart energy meters, water meters and such.

No. This data needs to be pushed into a streaming or push dataset by the originating system or a broker (even Power Automate could do it in a cinch but requires port openings which you may want to avoid).

What I am wondering is if anybody might have any thoughts (or experience) on using something like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi for this kind of task

Absolutely. Great choice. Been using RaspBerry PIs to push temperature/humidity/pressure data from multiple sensors like a BME280 into a streaming dataset for many years with no issues at all. You'll want to program in a little local buffer storage for cases when the Edge computer can't see the Power BI service temporarily.

TheHydra · ‎09-24-2023

Thank you lbendlin, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. I was wondering if you might be able to elaborate a little bit further on your first point, re the streaming or push dataset? I'm not very familiar with these?

Many thanks!

K