DjangoCon Europe 2016 - Django for IoT: From Hackathon to Production

Speaker: Anna Schneider (twitter) has a PhD in biophysics and learned Django at the Hackathon where whe started WattTime. See also here.

IoT

Internet of Things is meant when something that is not typically a computer transmits data and maybe even responds to control. IoT can involve embedded programming, but many things just have usable APIs.

Patterns

• Use db_index early and on timestamps, because you will have loads of data.
• use tasks instead of views
  • tasks initiate actions
  • tasks may monitor (pull attributes and statuses)
  • tasks may control (set attributes and statuses)
• since tasks run async, pass pks and not objects
• encapsulate the client/vendor library so that you can swap out devices
• break up into apps for production
  • devices: Device models, later maybe views for devices.
  • observations: Data models, later analytics views.
  • interactions: tasks.py, later on administration
  • vendor: wrapper for client libraries
• use celery for async tasks
  • don't use RabbitMQ to persist things, redis may work
• use the cookiecutter

IoT can actually improve the world, so go out there and try it.