Backyard Birds: Building My Own Dashboard on Top of Local Bird Data

Backyard Birds: Building My Own Dashboard on Top of Local Bird Data
A few weeks back I wrote about replacing my Haikubox with a four-camera local pipeline feeding BirdNET into TimescaleDB. The data was beautiful. The dashboards were not. Grafana is great for whether the heat pump cycled overnight or how warm the coop got. It is not great for what showed up in the yard for the first time this week, or what the dawn chorus actually sounds like in order. I kept tweaking panels and…

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax
For years, InfluxDB has been the data backbone of my Home Assistant setup. With the native Home Assistant integration and Grafana, I had my dashboards dialed in. While FluxQL was a bit of a learning curve, I was able to muscle through the syntax and get the visualizations I needed. As I started integrating LLMs into my daily workflow using custom services, n8n automation workflows, and MCP integrations, I hit a massive syntax wall. I…