How to stream ANT+ & BLE sensor data to InfluxDB: past, present, and future solutions

Last Updated on January 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

From Adafruit we have the Pyloton bike computer BLE example, which is well illustrated, which can be connected to an InfluxDB example:

https://thenewstack.io/getting-started-with-python-and-influxdb/

A second option is over Raspberri projects. This path has been developed over several projects.

1). It started with the “track your heart rate with Raspberri ANT+” from Andreas Bader, former PhD student of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich:

https://bin.re/blog/track-your-heartrate-on-raspberry-pi-with-ant/

2) A second Raspberri Pi with BLE was developed by Clinton Freeman, software engineer from Australia:

https://reprage.com/posts/2016-02-23-how-to-connect-the-raspberry-pi-to-a-bluetooth-heart-rate-monitor/

3) A third legally protected Raspberri Pi ANT+ which sends sensor data to an MQTT broker was developed by software engineer Reto Röllin from Infinity Flow Switzerland:

Raspberry Pi Ant+

4) a forth Raspberri Pi was developed by Ryan Hampton Product builder at balena:

https://github.com/rhampt/balena-health/

• balenaHealth replaced the ANT+ sensors which need a THIS IS ANT licence

• balenaHealth uses BLE sensors instead of ANT+ sensors

• it integrated MQTT

• it integrated InfluxDB

• it connected to the balenaCloud

• components of Dave Does Demos where integrated, too

• balenaHealth is demanding device which we did not study yet in detail, but if we go through the instruction descriptions of the three other models, we should find many helpful information

5) To connect BLE sports sensors to InfluxDB in an easy way, we can follow this instruction:

InfluxDB made easy?

Now, we should be able to stream our Ant+ and BLE sensor data to InfluxDB, studying these instructions of two Swiss scientists, a Swiss software engineer, an Australian software engineer, and a lead sales engineer from Georgia, and a computer engineer from India.

If we we’re revising these instructions, add code examples and illustrations, we can submit this work to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with the title:

“How to stream ANT+ and BLE sensor data to InfluxDB: past, present, and future solutions”

and apply for a PhD degree.

Directly connect balenaHealth to Home Assistant over MQTT