Although SmithTek 3DM SCADA Canvas is primarily aimed at creating dashboards for industrial applications such as process control, it can also be used very effectively for home-based projects where a flexible and/or creative dashboard layout is required.
Here's a link to the SmithTek 3DM Canvas node details, including examples and installation instructions.
My Home Sensor Project
In my particular case, I have four sensor nodes located around the exterior of my house. They report temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, as well as providing infrared detection for security purposes.
All of this information is sent to Node-RED via a private local MQTT broker, where it can be processed and displayed.
I also have an experimental ESP32-NOW network, consisting of a Base Station, Relay Station and several Remote Sensor nodes. This network collects additional information, which is also passed to Node-RED using MQTT.
Connecting Node-RED to 3DM Canvas
One of the things I particularly like about 3DM Canvas is how easy it is to integrate with an existing Node-RED system.
As shown below, it was very straightforward to create a small Node-RED flow to re-format the MQTT payload into the structure required by 3DM Canvas.
Dashboard for the Four Home Sensors
The next step was to create a 3DM dashboard for my four external sensors.
I found a suitable PNG image on the Internet and resized it so that it worked well within the 3DM Canvas environment.
I used a Table widget to display the current temperature, humidity and pressure, together with the time the last reading was received, for each of the four sensor nodes.
This gives me a simple at-a-glance view of the current conditions around the house.
ESP32-NOW Network Dashboard
My next project was to create a dashboard for the ESP32-NOW network.
The basic approach was exactly the same as for the home sensors — I created a suitable background image and then added a number of Table widgets to display the information being received from the different nodes.
I then experimented with the layout and added some additional widgets to produce a cleaner and more informative display where the function of the various nodes is colour coordinated.
Using Actions for Drill-Down Information
One particularly useful feature is the Action widget, which allows an element on the dashboard to be used to trigger an action — in my case, to drill down to a more detailed page.
This makes it possible to keep the main dashboard relatively uncluttered while still providing access to more detailed information when required.
Conclusion
Although 3DM Canvas is clearly capable of producing sophisticated industrial SCADA interfaces, I have found that it is equally useful for smaller home automation and IoT projects.
The combination of MQTT, Node-RED and 3DM Canvas provides a very flexible way of collecting data from a variety of devices and then presenting that information in a visually appealing and highly customised dashboard.
For anyone already using Node-RED, I think 3DM Canvas is well worth investigating, particularly if the standard Node-RED dashboard components don't provide the flexibility or visual appearance you are looking for.
