You can easily put together an IoT network of smart displays for data visualization to supercharge your research efforts in Data Science or any quantitative field.

You can call the "push" of your plots to the clients right from within your statistical code (Python, R, Matlab/Octave, SAS, etc),and it updates the displays in real-time.

The idea is that cheap old desktop monitors you may have lying around can be re-purposed to IoT devices where cheap Raspberry Pi development boards receive and display your data visualizations wirelessly in real-time from your primary device (e.g. laptop). If you don't have any flatscreens don't worry, they're free - near free.

The cost and hardware requirements are minimal.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

1 or more Raspberry Pi's I started with 3, of which 2 were 3B+ and 1 was a Zero Cost: ~$10 - $40



Any display

I started with a few pre-HDMI flatscreen displays Free - $25/each on Free Cycle, Craigslist, 2nd hand stores, your garage, eBay, etc. To get good deals on older heavier items like this shop locally. People are throwing out their desktop gear. Optional: Flat-screen wall mounts (~$9 for normal desktop size screens, $20 - $30 for big screen displays, e.g. 50")



If it has no HDMI (or if you're using a Pi Zero) you can just get a converter < $8 from Amazon, eBay, Micro Center, Walmart, your friend, wherever

HDMI or micro-HDMI cables Free if you got it with your Pi or have tons of spares like me

$2 with free shipping from various online retailers

Once you have the code from GitHub, the hardware, and your Raspberry Pi's are running whatever OS you want, I estimate this should take a few minutes to 1 hour at most.

You could easily adapt this project to other IoT use cases. You might also want to make an Arduino version! Please feel free to collaborate with me on GitHub.