Thingsboard
Building an IoT Telemetry Pipeline with ThingsBoard: Architecture, Trade-offs, and Lessons Learned Summary This article documents my journey implementing an end-to-end IoT data pipeline using ThingsBoard Community Edition (CE) , MQTT , and Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) . It covers the architectural decisions, the practical steps to make binary telemetry usable, dashboard design principles, security and redaction practices for sharing work publicly, and the lessons I learned moving from a local prototype toward a production-ready approach. Security note : All values in this post (broker address, topics, tokens, schema, and identifiers) are intentionally anonymized using placeholders like <BROKER_ADDRESS> and <ACCESS_TOKEN> . Background & Objectives Our devices publish telemetry over MQTT using Protobuf payloads. Protobuf keeps messages small and efficient, but the binary format is not directly consumable by dashboards or analytics tools. The goal of this work was ...