Guides
Practical, long-form guides on getting industrial hardware onto the cloud — Modbus and RS485, ESP32 gateways, MQTT, dashboards, alerts and fleet operations — written by the people who build Synacl.
We built a tool to read our own logs, and opened it up
Most AI crawler traffic in synacl.com's logs was fake. The checker and weekly read we built to spot it are now siteread, a free, open-source tool.
MQTT vs HTTP for IoT telemetry: bytes, battery and commands
MQTT vs HTTP for IoT telemetry, measured: bytes per reading, TLS handshake cost, battery and cellular data, commands to the device and offline detection.
Cold-chain temperature monitoring with ESP32 and DS18B20
Cold-chain temperature monitoring with ESP32 and DS18B20 probes: safe ranges, probe accuracy, buffered probes, alerts that ignore door openings, records.
ThingsBoard vs Synacl: which IoT platform for a small fleet?
ThingsBoard vs Synacl compared honestly: hosting, getting Modbus devices in, ESP32 support, rules, OTA, pricing and data-point limits — and when ThingsBoard is…
ESP32 OTA updates for a fleet: A/B partitions and rollback
ESP32 OTA updates for a fleet: how the A/B partitions work, what a failed update does, what rollback can and can't undo, and how to roll out safely.
Turn a Raspberry Pi into an IoT gateway — no firmware, no code
Make a Raspberry Pi an IoT gateway with one command: monitor its CPU temperature remotely, bridge a Tasmota plug from your local MQTT broker, read a Modbus TCP…
IoT device uptime monitoring: how to tell a dead device from a quiet one
IoT uptime monitoring done properly: offline windows, heartbeats, gateway vs device outages, honest availability numbers and alerts that don't cry wolf.
How to read a Modbus energy meter: register maps, float32 and word order
How to read a Modbus energy meter: register maps and addressing, float32 and word order, scaling, and kWh counters, with Eastron SDM and PZEM-004T examples.
How to flash an ESP32 from your browser: offsets, drivers, fixes
Flash an ESP32 .bin from Chrome or Edge, no esptool or IDE: which offset each file takes, which driver you need, when to hold BOOT, and what the errors mean.
Program an ESP32 without writing code: browser flash + Claude
Program an ESP32 without writing code: flash it from the browser, tell Claude what the board should do over MCP, review the macro it wrote, and run it on the b…
Modbus RTU vs Modbus TCP: how to choose for PLCs, meters and sensors
Modbus RTU vs Modbus TCP compared for real installations — wiring, distance, speed, addressing, cost per device, and how to decide when a PLC offers both.
ESP32 Modbus RTU to a cloud dashboard in 15 minutes
Wire an RS485 sensor to an ESP32, flash it from the browser, and get live Modbus RTU readings onto a cloud dashboard with an alert — register by register, no f…
ThingsBoard alternatives in 2026: picking an IoT platform for a small industrial fleet
ThingsBoard alternatives compared for small industrial fleets: ThingSpeak, Blynk, Datacake, Ubidots, TagoIO, Thinger.io, Node-RED and Synacl.