cloud - How do I create a Near Edge computing system? (Send sensor data with Raspberry Pi/DHT11 sensor)

Question

I am working on edge computing for IoT applications and expected to create a system that acts as a near edge computer with the use of a raspberry pi hooked up to a dht11 sensor. How do I send this data over to a computer that is at the edge? Ideally I want to use my PC as this device but I have no clue how to send this data over in real time.

So far I have created the circuit and can view the temperature and humidity readings on the raspberry pi in python. Unsure of what the next steps are - I don't want to send this data over to the cloud just yet.

Side note: I believe i may be missing knowledge regarding this but is the raspberry pi an edge device because it is hooked up to the sensor directly?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to think this through a bit more. What will you do with the temperature and humidity data that you receive?

For example, if you're just experimenting and want to just see the readings in a console on your PC, you can use netcat to send the console output of your Python program from the RPi to PC. No SW development needed, they just have to be in the same network. Not particularly useful for anything else, either.

Otherwise you need to set up some client-server solution between the RPi and your PC. There's a ton of possible solutions, all depending on what you plan to do with the data. You can use MQTT, HTTP, a straight database connection (MySQL, PostgreSQL), etc. You have to supply both sides of the connection. The Python code on client side which connects and sends data; and the server side thing that accepts the samples and stores them somewhere. Plus all the networking, authentication etc.

Or you can just download the Python client libraries for your favourite cloud solution and set that up according to a tutorial. TBH, this sounds a lot less work to me.