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.
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, the BOOT button, and what to do when it fails
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: a browser flash, a sentence to Claude, and a macro that runs on the board
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.