Course 4: Data Visualization
In your applications, you’ll collect large amounts of data from hardware and other data sources. Once you have that data, the next step is to visualize it so you can extract insights and detect patterns. Course 4 covers all of Losant’s data visualization features. This course will help you create visualizations to view your data in the best way possible.
Chapter 1: Dashboard Overview
Each dashboard in Losant consists of one or many blocks. Each block is meant to help you visualize different pieces of information. This chapter is your overview of dashboards. We will cover creating dashboards, adding blocks, and basic dashboard settings.
Chapter 2: Bar and Line Charts
Three popular dashboard blocks are the Pie Chart Block, the Bar Chart Block, and the Time Series Block. In this chapter, we will explore each of these blocks and add them to a dashboard.
Chapter 3: Indicator and Gauge Blocks
The Indicator Block allows you to display custom messages on the dashboard. The Gauge Block is used to display single number values. Both blocks allow for a configurable background color and text. In this chapter, we will dig into these blocks and add them to a dashboard.
Chapter 4: GPS Blocks
Losant provides two GPS blocks to make viewing any asset on a map as simple as possible. Using these blocks, we can track where an asset is and see those changes over time. These assets can be anything: a truck, a person, a pallet, you name it. This chapter covers the GPS History Block and the GPS Heatmap Block.
Chapter 5: Position Chart
Knowing where assets are in the world is one problem, but tracking assets indoors, like in an office, is an entirely different problem. We provide the Position Chart Block to make this easy. In this chapter, we are going to talk about the Position Chart Block. It is very similar to the GPS blocks. However, the small differences made it worthy of its own chapter.
Chapter 6: Input Controls Block
Until now, we’ve been just viewing data on the dashboard, but none of our dashboards or blocks have interacted with data or devices. This is where the Input Controls Block comes in. The Input Controls Block allows you to interact with your data and devices directly from within a dashboard. In this chapter, we explore the Input Controls Block.
Chapter 7: Context Variables
Up until this point in the course, we’ve been assigning one dashboard per device. But, things get more complicated when you have to manage a ton of devices. As you can imagine, creating a unique dashboard for thousands of devices could be cumbersome. Context Variables are the key to solving this problem. In this chapter, we will take a look at an example of how to use Context Variables.
Workshop
The purpose of the Data Visualization Workshop is to give you real, step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish and use most of the tools we covered throughout the course.
This workshop builds on the Course Three Workshop and will guide you through creating dashboard blocks and showing you how to use context variables.
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