Great write up! We found many of the same issues as you did when we tried connecting devices, so we created dweet.io.
We are not a substitute for MQTT, but we made dweet to help you get your things online quickly and easily so you can concentrate on making apps. Standards take forever to hash out, so we made something that can get you going really quickly.
Have you had a chance to look into dweet? https://dweet.io is the homepage, so let me know if you have any questions.
Freeboard is in public beta right now and there is no charge. We will post price information soon, and we will always have a free option, like dweet.io.
All current functionality will remain free. New functionality that we end up building may fall into a paid category.
You can build your own widgets in Freeboard, and once completed, users can share new widgets directly with each other through GitHub. We are looking to build a marketplace of sorts as well, populated by the community, and curated for convenience.
Great point! Freeboard is great for humanizing a single device, or multiple datasources at a time, but when you get into 100s of thousands of devices, freeboard can be used to visualize an analytics engine.
By the way, you can use dweet.io to fill that database or analytics enginge to your hearts desire. Then use freeboard to see what is happening in that database!
Hey, this is awesome. Would you mind if we sent a tweet about what you did and link to that code? Any chance you might be interested in writing a guest blog on how you connected?
Our only use-case was ridiculously simple. I don't think CoAP or MQTT fit into that use-case, however at some point, yes we will add other protocols. Thank you.