IoT & Big Data: From Sensor to Dashboard, via IBM i

The iot-bigdata-lab was built for IAE Montpellier MBA students: sensor → MQTT broker → Node-RED pipeline → dashboard, with IBM i Db2 providing the business context. The goal was to give non-developers a real mental model of what their engineers actually build.

The pattern matters beyond the classroom. Industrial IoT data (vibration, temperature, pressure) is only useful when joined with business context — maintenance history, asset SLAs, production orders — and that context almost always lives in IBM i. The vms-iot-dashboard project shows this in a real manufacturing scenario.

Node-RED remains my go-to prototyping tool. The node-red-contrib-db2-for-i node I published connects any Node-RED flow directly to IBM i Db2 — thousands of downloads, still used in production.