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Ask HN: Best language or library for handling data streams from sensors?

2 points by foobarbecue ↗ HN
I'm often in a situation where I have some sensors (e.g. temperature, camera, seismometer, GPS, CO2 concentration, force/torque sensor, spectra from instrument ...), and I want to collect that data with a bit of live processing and display. LabView seems popular for this, but I'd like something free and open source. I've built some systems like this in python and some in C++, but it feels like "reinventing the wheel" each time. I'd like something where I define inputs, define some live plots, define storage, and I'm done. Maybe ROS is the way to go?

2 comments

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jaegerpicker
I think we have a slightly different use case as I'm mostly collecting sensor data for ag automation on a homestead scale and I'm a python programmer already but for me python has been impossible to beat so far. The combination of easy of use, the massive ecosystem, and wide spread support/internet resources make it hard to beat IMO.
foobarbecue
Sounds like your experience could be quite useful to me. Could you describe your approach and some of the libraries you use in python?

In the past, I've mostly used python where I create a singleton class for each instrument, store to sqlite, plot with holoviews. It's fine, but I find managing the concurrency on the input side quite complicated and annoying to manage and when I have pull-based sensors rather than sensors that update at a fixed rate I'm never sure if I'm getting data as quickly as I could be.