We were searching around for ThingSpeak IoT resources and noticed that Google was sharing the top questions related to ThingSpeak. Christopher Stapels and I thought that it would be fun to answer them and share them as a blog post. So, here we are.

Some people use ThingSpeak for monitoring machine processes. This allows them to share the data with potential customers and ensure the process is within control. There are over a million ThingSpeak channels representing a vast assortment of projects.  Some projects measure the temperature and humidity in one room, some projects include a global network of air quality monitors. You can send data to ThingSpeak from your devices, create instant visualization of live data, and send alerts.

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First, I would like to introduce the new ThingSpeak Community hosted at MathWorks. The community will moderated and curated by Christopher Stapels, product marketing manager for ThingSpeak and IoT engineer extraordinaire.

What is ThingSpeak? ThingSpeak is an IoT analytics platform service that allows you to aggregate, visualize, and analyze live data streams in the cloud. You can send data to ThingSpeak from your devices, create instant visualization of live data, and send alerts. It has MATLAB Analytics tailored for IoT included.

ThingSpeak has a vibrant community of makers and engineers and users all over the world. We are

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This time of year is about staying connected, maybe more so this year than with previous years. CheerLights is an IoT project to share some of the connections through synchronized lights. All of the lights connected to the CheerLights feed hosted on ThingSpeak stay in sync. The lights all shine with the same color. Now, the fun part, anyone can change the color using Twitter. Just send a tweet to @CheerLights and mention a color. This will send the color to lights all around the world!

If you are just learning about the Internet of Things, you can use CheerLights as a Hello World project to get started. Once you learn how CheerLights works, you can learn how to build on top of it and create new connected projects.

CheerLights are back at

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ThingSpeak automatically gives you access to the latest MATLAB features from the latest MATLAB release. MATLAB R2020b now includes swarmchart to create sarm scatter charts! The charts are a great way to visualize many measurements across a limited number of categories.

Here is a swarm chart of wind speed versus hour of day. The chart is created with just two lines of MATLAB code (and a few more for formatting the plot). This plot uses data from the weather station on top of the parking garage at the MathWorks Apple Hill location in Natick (Channel 12397).

Since the weather station also includes temperature, I’ve color-coded the points using the temperatures for the day.

To create this chart in ThingSpeak, select the MATLAB Visualizations app, and create a new

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ThingSpeak users frequently ask how to build customized views for their ThingSpeak data. The channel view provides automatically generated field plots that are customizable with the ThingSpeak Charts API or a MATLAB visualization. You might want to run prepackaged analysis repeatedly or based on a variable you can set. You might want to view data from multiple channels, or view channels depending on a condition. For example, you could show the channels for all devices that have a measurement higher than a given threshold.

Christopher Stapels, the ThingSpeak Product Manager, built an IoT data explorer app for MATLAB. The app is available for download on

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Christopher Stapels, the product marketing manager for ThingSpeak, told me that we crossed ONE MILLION CHANNELS of IoT data on ThingSpeak. We have come along way over the years. The first channel that we created got the Channel ID of 1. We deleted the channel to test if the channel deletion feature works. Then, we created a second channel, sent data to it, cleared it, and deleted it. The oldest active ThingSpeak channel is Channel 3. It’s still collecting weather data from my parent’s house after 10 years. I never expected to see seven-digit channel ID numbers, like Channel 1018612 based in Oslo, Norway.

Thanks to all of our users who keep collecting data, adding devices, and analyzing data on ThingSpeak! This is a huge milestone

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For this post, I would like to introduce Christopher Stapels as our guest blogger. Christopher builds lots of cool IoT projects and is omnipresent on MATLAB Central and ThingSpeak and MATLAB questions. He is also the product marketing manager for ThingSpeak and MATLAB hardware here at MathWorks. Welcome to the team!

ThingSpeak has added an alerts API to let you to send emails from your ThingSpeak account. Let me say that again… ThingSpeak now offers email alerts!

Use the new alerts API key to trigger emails and check the sent email history using MATLAB code or another HTTP client.  With MATLAB code in ThingSpeak, you can read and

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Long-range wireless communication technology enables the transfer of sensor data over a long distance while using low-power radios for connectivity. This technology can be leveraged to connect sensors covering a large geographic area and give you insights into what is happening. With agricultural applications it is important to measure the soil moisture and efficiently irrigate. A big challenge for agricultural applications is robust connectivity in remote locations. By using a combination of The Things Network and ThingSpeak insightful applications can be built. The Things Network is a protocol and infrastructure that provides a link to cloud applications using LoRaWAN® technology. If you are already a The Things Network user, check out the documentation about the ThingSpeak integration at The Things Network.

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Have you ever wondered if the air around you is healthy? It is possible to understand air quality by using MATLAB to analyze air quality data collected by an air quality sensor on  ThingSpeak.

Good or moderate air quality is when the Air Quality Index (AQI) is 100 or less. AQI is a relative measurement of five common air pollutants: ground-level ozone, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. A high AQI indicates a higher level of pollution and is considered unhealthy over 100.

We have installed a PurpleAir sensor at the MathWorks Apple Hill campus in Natick, MA. PurpleAir sensors use laser

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Interest in predictive maintenance is increasing as more and more companies see it as a key application for data analytics that leverages IoT systems. Branko Dijkstra, a technical consultant at MathWorks, held a talk at the MATLAB Conference and covers the development of predictive maintenance algorithms, as well as their deployment on the two main nodes of IoT systems—the edge and the cloud.

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The ThingSpeak team has released an updated version of the ThingSpeak Communication Library for Arduino, ESP8266, and ESP32 devices. The ThingSpeak library is the easiest way to get Arduino devices connected to ThingSpeak IoT services. The library now features a way to separate secret credentials from your main source code. This helps when you want to share your code but don’t want to share your WiFi credentials and ThingSpeak keys.

The Arduino IDE needs to have the ThingSpeak library installed in order for your devices to know how to send data to ThingSpeak. In the Arduino IDE, choose Sketch, Include Library, and Manage Libraries. Search for “thingspeak” and click Install.

The ThingSpeak Communication Library supports many devices. Using the library makes the experience the same for each board type. When you learn one way to work with ThingSpeak, you will be to

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This is a guest post by Diamond Blackwell, ACM-W President at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

On Friday, October 26, 2018, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette opened its doors to over 900 students participating in Science Day. This is a campus-wide event where high school students throughout Louisiana come to visit university’s various science departments. Our department, the College of Computing and Informatics, put on four demos for students to partake in.

The Association of Computing Machinery – Women (ACM-W) club, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in tech, decided we should do something different than the previous year for our demo. Our organization’s advisor, Dr. Sonya Hsu, gave us the idea to try a Deep Learning and IoT, Internet of Things demo presented at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing this past September by the team from MathWorks. With the help from the MathWorks GHC team and colleagues,

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Dear friends, we: Louvere Walker-Hannon, an application engineer who assists customers doing deep learning and data analytics, Shruti Karulkar, a quality engineering lead for test and measurement, and Anoush Najarian, a performance engineer, put together this blog post on behalf of the MathWorks GHC team.

Our team had an awesome time at GHC 18, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Going to the conference helped our team members get to know each other, and brought out superpowers we didn’t know existed!

This is our first year as a sponsor of the conference.Grace Hopper Celebration is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Besides recruiting and attending key technology talks, our team delivered a hands-on MATLAB workshop on Deep Learning and IoT.

We were thrilled to have a hands-on workshop

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Libelium makes the Meshlium IoT Gateway that supports commercial IoT systems and sensor applications such as waste management, forest fire detection, potable water monitoring, supply chain control, and fleet tracking. Libelium now supports ThingSpeak, so that you can take IoT applications to the next level by using ThingSpeak’s integrated MATLAB enabled IoT analytics and visualizations.

ThingSpeak is a MATLAB enabled IoT analytics

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We have published an example in the ThingSpeak documentation that shows you how to train a feedforward neural network to predict temperature. The feedforward neural network is one of the simplest types of artificial networks but has broad applications in IoT. Feedforward networks consist of a series of layers. The first layer has a connection from the network input. Each other layer has a connection from the previous layer. The final layer produces the network’s output. In our IoT application, the output will be the predicted temperature.

We are collecting data in a ThingSpeak channel and will use the integrated MATLAB analytics. To predict the temperature, this example makes use of the Neural Network Toolbox in MATLAB along with the data collected in a

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The ThingSpeak IoT has been building a new framework to support widgets on channel views. Widgets can be added to the public or private view of a ThingSpeak channel and even be embedded in 3rd-party systems and dashboards. The first widget that we are releasing is the gauge!

At the recent Boston TechJam, MathWorks had a ThingSpeak People Counter that used face detection to count people that came over to our booth and learned about our demo. The people counter uses MATLAB to identify faces in a live video stream from a webcam, count the number of faces, and send the results to ThingSpeak. The code and instructions for the ThingSpeak People Counter project are on File Exchange.

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The ThingSpeak team has integrated the Predictive Maintenance Toolbox for MATLAB into the IoT Analytics features of ThingSpeak. The Predictive Maintenance Toolbox provides tools for labeling data, designing condition indicators, and estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of a machine. You can analyze and label machine data imported from local files, cloud storage, and distributed file systems. You can also label simulated failure data generated from Simulink models.

Here is a quick list of features of the Predictive Maintenance Toolbox for MATLAB:

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I am excited to announce a number of new features that are available to all ThingSpeak users. We added the ability for ThingSpeak channels to be organized by tags. ThingSpeak channels have a “tags” setting that allows you to enter some tags separated by a comma. I use them to organize my channels by a project identifier. In some of my projects, I need a few channels to represent the system. By tagging both channels with the same project identifier, I can see the related channels. We have added a search box to help you search by tags. You can also click on a tag within your channel list to see only the channels that match.

We also added support for tags within the ThingSpeak User API. Just pass the same tag into the API call to ThingSpeak, and you will receive a list of channels that match. This is

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As most of you know I love building IoT projects. Most of these maker projects use an Arduino, Particle, or Raspberry Pi, like my IR color-changing robot that connects to ThingSpeak and the CheerLights project.

I recently became the moderator of the MATLAB Maker Community that is hosted on MATLAB Central. There are many times where MATLAB and Simulink can help build a hardware-based project or be used to create the code running on a device. I also use MATLAB for analytics. Here are the most popular colors on CheerLights in the last 30 days.

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Join the MathWorks and ThingSpeak IoT team at the MIT Connected Things 2018 conference held at the MIT Media Lab on April 5, 2018. MathWorks is proud to be a sponsor for a second year and we are looking forward to sharing our IoT solutions. We have tools for every part of the IoT workflow — everything from edge analytics to cloud analytics.

Randy Cronk, a volunteer at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, sits down with Eric Wetjen of MathWorks and interviews him about IoT solutions from MathWorks and our ThingSpeak IoT Analytics platform. Check out the interview on the Connected Things

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Douglas Mawrey created a Smart Humidity Sensor using ThingSpeak to collect data, MATLAB to analyze the data, and IFTTT to send push notifications for certain conditions. This project uses the outdoor temperature to determine the ideal indoor humidity and inform you about the room’s comfort. The data and condition results are displayed on Douglas’ public ThingSpeak channel 418058. This project is a good starting point to see the power of the MATLAB integration on ThingSpeak and how to perform real-time condition monitoring.

This project uses the ESP-based NodeMCU as an IoT gateway to forward sensor data to ThingSpeak. The

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Social media is blowing up the term bomb cyclone. The term is everywhere from Twitter to 24/7 news coverage of the storm hitting the East Coast of the United States. The technical term for a bomb cyclone is bombogenesis which is the combination of “bomb” and “cyclogenesis.” Or, you could call it an explosive cyclogenesis to grab views to your blog.

A storm undergoes bombogenesis when its central low pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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ThingSpeak has APIs for collecting data produced by sensors and APIs for reading that data from applications. Think of an IoT project as two parts. One part of the project is where you need to program a thing to send data. And, the second part is where you want to see that data. ThingSpeak sits in the middle and makes it handy to do both, as Marcelo Rovai points out. Once you have a system like Marcelo’s set up, you can take advantage of integrated online MATLAB Analytics.

Marcelo has put together a great tutorial that uses

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The ThingSpeak IoT service now supports MQTT subscriptions to receive instant updates when a ThingSpeak channel gets updated. MQTT is a powerful standard for IoT systems. ThingSpeak enables clients to update and receive updates from channel feeds via the ThingSpeak MQTT broker. MQTT is a publish/subscribe communication protocol that uses TCP/IP sockets or WebSockets. MQTT over WebSockets can be secured with SSL. A client device connects to the MQTT broker and can publish to a channel or subscribe to updates from that channel.

We also published a new File Exchange submission that allows you to publish and subscribe using MQTT within MATLAB. Download and install MQTT in MATLAB to be able to connect to ThingSpeak’s MQTT server or connect to other

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Naman Chauhan from SRM University created a proof-of-concept project that measures your resting heart rate and sends the data for analysis via a $5 Wi-Fi device. The project is fully documented with the source code on either Hackaday or Hackster.

Naman uses an Arduino for processing the heartbeat data and turns the data into heartbeats per minute. Then, periodically, the device sends the data to ThingSpeak for data storage and data analysis using MATLAB. The heart rate monitor is connected to the internet using DFROBOT’s ESP8266 Wi-Fi Bee. The Wi-Fi Bee turns serial

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Tides go up and down. But, the question is when and how will the tide levels change in the future. If you are planning a boating trip or trying to understand how the wind affects tide levels during storms, you want to predict the tide levels using data that you have collected locally. In a tutorial published on Hackster.io, you will be able to learn how to use ThingSpeak to collect sensor data that represents the tide height at a given time, use MATLAB to preprocess the data, use MATLAB to predict future tide levels, and use ThingSpeak to send alerts. Here’s what the system looks like installed at a dock in Cape Cod.

The tide height is calculated using an ultrasonic level sensor. This measurement is taken periodically and then sent to

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An emerging topic with IoT is Digital Twin (DT).

The digital twin is a federation of data and models that can be analyzed or put into a simulation to create useful information about the past, present, or future of the DT’s physical twin.

Bruce Sinclair of the Iot-Inc. Business Show podcast invite Jim Tung, a MathWorks fellow, to discuss models, simulation, and digital twins. Jim shares information about a few MathWorks customer use cases and our products used for modeling, simulation, and IoT.

Bruce and Jim talk about many interesting and key topics for IoT system development, including:

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Many IoT projects collect data from a sensor and send the data to ThingSpeak at the same time over and over. To continuously collect and send data to the cloud requires the device to be powered and connected all of the time. A battery-powered IoT device like a Particle Photon or Onion Omega2 would run out of power quickly. There are many IoT applications where you want your IoT device to collect the data offline over a long period of time, then send the data all at once to ThingSpeak for analysis.

The ThingSpeak team at MathWorks is excited to announce Bulk-Update! This new ThingSpeak feature is targeted at IoT devices trying to optimize battery use by allowing the device to update a lot of data at once. To help you get started with bulk-update, we have written examples for

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We are excited to return to the 124th Annual American Society of Engineering Education Conference & Exposition! ASEE is committed to fostering the exchange of ideas, enhancing teaching methods and curriculum, and providing prime networking opportunities for engineering and technology education stakeholders such as: deans, faculty members, and industry and government representatives. MathWorks is proud to sponsor and support engineering education initiatives.

This year, I will be hosting an IoT workshop with Dr. Gerald W. Recktenwald, Portland State University, Jeff Branson from SparkFun, Dr. Duncan James Bremner P.E. from the University of Glasgow. Our session is called, “Your Head in the Clouds: A Hands-on Workshop on Using IoT Devices as Teaching

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Smoking ribs or a pork shoulder requires lots of patience and practice. When everything works, you get to enjoy an amazing dinner. When things go wrong, you end up with dry, overcooked meat that only your dog may enjoy. Here’s what great BBQ looks like from @AndreasHarsch.

My process of smoking meat, cheese, or even ice cream is to monitor only the meat temperature and the internal temperature of the smoker. When I finish a cook, I go back and try to learn from the data. I do not attempt to control the smoker using the Internet of Things, I use IoT to collect the data with ThingSpeak, analyze the data with MATLAB, and apply the insights to the next cook. The best advice that I have been given is to not change too many variables. Stick with simple rubs, the same charcoal, the same wood, the same cuts of

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April 9th is IoT Day! We are celebrating by announcing new IoT Analytic features. All ThingSpeak users now have access to the new features of MATLAB R2017a. In ThingSpeak you can analyze and visualize your data using the power of MATLAB. With the latest updates you can visualize your IoT data as a heatmap and analyze large sets of time-stamped data using a tall timetable.

In the latest update, we have added many new analytics features perfect for IoT data:

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April 1st is Arduino Day, no joke! For in person events near you, check out the Arduino Day website. If you have been kicking around an idea about a project to build, this is a great time to try to get it done and share it with others from around the world. We provide some great tools to build projects that use Arduino.

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Anders Sollander, a principal technical consultant at MathWorks, and his team put together a project to determine what demo was the most popular at one of our demo showcases. Anders made an assumption that if your demo was popular, you would have a lot of visitors. If you have a lot of visitors, your demo would be the loudest.

Anders was determined to measure sound from over 20 demo stations at the same time and figure out who the the winner is. This turns out to be a complicated challenge and he used our tools such as MATLAB, Simulink, and ThingSpeak, to produce some interesting results. Here’s what the raw data looks like from just five sound sensor nodes at the demo stations.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) enables power producers, public utilities, and other companies in the energy sector to collect energy power consumption data from hundreds of factories and thousands of homes in near real time. This wealth of information has opened opportunities to evaluate energy efficiency initiatives, predict power demand, and perform energy audits.

Consulting firm Cadmus provides full-spectrum energy-efficiency support services to energy utilities throughout North America. These services include studies of energy use that require extensive data collection and analysis.

To make the most of the opportunities presented by the IoT, Cadmus engineers used MATLAB® and the

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Takuji Fukumoto, an Application Engineer at MathWorks, shared a project with me that he created that uses capabilities of MATLAB Mobile, MATLAB Drive, MATLAB Online, and ThingSpeak. His project uses MATLAB Mobile to send its position and sensor data to ThingSpeak. He then uses MATLAB® to process the data and generate maps of his position.

You might have noticed recently on ThingSpeak that you can link your ThingSpeak user account to a MathWorks Account. By doing so, you have access to other MathWorks products and services that you can use with the same user account. MATLAB Mobile is a native Apple or

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MQTT is a common protocol used in IoT systems to connect low-level devices and sensors. MQTT is used to pass short messages to and from a broker. ThingSpeak has recently added an MQTT broker so devices can send messages to ThingSpeak. A message might contain the current temperature in an office collected by a sensor. ThingSpeak takes the message and stores its content in a ThingSpeak channel. Once the data is in a channel, you can easily visualize and analyze the data with MATLAB code.

The ThingSpeak MQTT broker is available now to all ThingSpeak users!

To help users get started using MQTT to send data to ThingSpeak, we have created some examples for common devices and applications that support MQTT.

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ThingSpeak has experienced tremendous growth over the past 6 years and we continue to add new users from all over the world who are building amazing IoT projects that use ThingSpeak and MATLAB.

As the ThingSpeak user community grows, we have been hearing requests for sending many millions of messages to ThingSpeak, connecting more devices, and building scalable commercial solutions. To address these requests, we are releasing new paid options for ThingSpeak. For more information, see the How to Buy page and the ThingSpeak licensing FAQ.

ThingSpeak users can continue to send up to 3 million messages per year for free (about 8200 messages per day). That satisfies the needs of 99.5% of the user community. To determine how many messages you are using, you can login and look at your account

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Over the weekend, I noticed a tweet about a people counter using MATLAB and ThingSpeak being demonstrated at Big Data Spain. They were able to detect over 1,500 visitors at their demo station.

The project uses MATLAB to create a cloud-based people counter by detecting faces with the Computer Vision System Toolbox. The raw people count is then sent to the ThingSpeak IoT platform for data collection in the cloud and further data analysis.

Check out File Exchange to learn how to build your own people counter using MATLAB and

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ThingSpeak offers an easy way to collect data from things, analyze and visualize the data with MATLAB, and act on your data. With MATLAB from MathWorks, you have access to powerful data processing and analysis functions for IoT data. To extend the functionality, we offer toolboxes such as the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox and Signal Processing Toolbox. These toolboxes need a license from MathWorks. If you have access to these toolboxes linked to a MathWorks Account, you have access to many of the toolboxes on ThingSpeak. All you have to do is to log in to ThingSpeak using your MathWorks Account credentials. With very little code, it is possible to

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We released a new version of MATLAB® and it’s available now for every ThingSpeak user. MATLAB R2016b includes many new features that make it easy to work with time-stamped tabular data, manipulate, compare, and store text data efficiently, and find, fill, and remove missing data.

With multiple sensors around my house or office, I want to be able to send data to multiple ThingSpeak channels. But, when I want to perform data analysis, I have a hard time working with data from multiple channels. The channels do not have the same time stamps and are out-of-sync with each other.

With R2016b of MATLAB, I am able to use the new timetable data container. Once the data is a stored as a timetable, I can perform powerful operations such as

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Allie Fauer, a designer from New York, has released another awesome Instructable tutorial on how to build a “To Do List Reminder Light”. This project is very creative and easy to build on your own. Allie tracks her tasks on an app called Todoist. With a little help of the MATLAB Analysis app on ThingSpeak, Allie is able to analyze her tasks and alert herself of anything overdue. She gently reminds herself with a glowing “Remembrall” globe.

Allie uses the MATLAB Analysis app on ThingSpeak to check her to do list and see if anything is overdue. If a task is overdue, the MATLAB code writes the task overdue into a ThingSpeak channel. The

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We launched MATLAB Analysis and Visualizations on ThingSpeak last year and have noticed a sharp increase in IoT analytics being used in your projects. We are seeing everything from analyzing squirrel behaviour to analyzing traffic patterns. As we are all learning how to use MATLAB in our IoT projects, we need to take notice of MATLAB Central.

MATLAB Central is “a place where you can get answers.” We have over

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2016 has been a huge year for IoT and the growth of ThingSpeak. We are looking at where our users and visitors are coming from and we are seeing some surprising trends. India alone represents 10% of ThingSpeak traffic and usage. The countries of Europe make up over 35% of ThingSpeak. Poland is also a strong IoT country. We have noticed many public weather stations and radiation detectors popping up all around the country. Poland by itself represents 3% of our traffic and usage. The last surprise is Australia dropping out of the Top 10.

*According to

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Lord Kelvin said, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” In Carsten’s project, he built a squirrel feeder complete with sensors and a camera. The “Squirrel Cafe” allows squirrels to lift a cover and take a peanut. When that happens, data gets collected and the feeder tweets its data summary with a photo. Carsten is learning a lot about the behaviours of the squirrels and is also trying to forecast the coming winter based on how many nuts are being taken. Behind-the-scenes, he is using Raspberry Pi, ThingSpeak, and MATLAB.

The Squirrel Cafe is connected to the ThingSpeak IoT Analytics platform using the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi collects data from a tilt sensor, temperature sensor, and a camera to determine how many nuts

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Rob Purser, our Senior Development Manager for IoT, will be holding a hands-on workshop at this year’s IoT Evolution in Las Vegas. Rob will teach the attendees how to prototype IoT analytics using MATLAB and the IoT platform, ThingSpeak.

The Internet of Things typically involves a discussion of smart devices and the cloud, with much less attention paid to the data collection, pre-processing of acquired data, and development of real-time analytics algorithms. A successful data analytics strategy involves embedded sensor analytics, historical data analysis, and online analytics. In this hands-on session, each participant will work with devices and try out the various types of analytics in action.

Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
900

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I will be joining a panel at the ASEE’s 123rd Annual Conference in New Orleans. The goal of our panel is to discuss what students need to learn to be successful in IoT. Our session is Tuesday, June 28th, 2016 at 1:15pm in Room 261 at the New Orleans Convention Center.

The IoT panel at ASEE will be moderated by Dr. Gerald W. Recktenwald and features Dr. Jacob Segil from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dr. Duncan James Bremner P.E. from the University of Glasgow, and Hans Scharler from MathWorks.

New Orleans Convention Center
900 Convention Center Blvd
New Orleans, LA

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[Haodong Liang] has released a weather station project with full MATLAB data analysis, device source code, and procedures on Hackster.io. He used the Particle Electron to connect the SparkFun weather station to ThingSpeak anywhere covered by a 2G/3G cellular data network. The project demonstrates how to build your own and start exploring data collected by ThingSpeak with MATLAB.

The project also shows you how to use MATLAB to get very detailed visualizations and data analysis of the data collected by the weather station. Some of the examples include histograms of temperature, humidity, and pressure, curve fitting, daily comparisons, and 3D plots of temperature.

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If you are looking to start with the Internet of Things, then try out the Arduino MKR1000 and connect it to the ThingSpeak IoT Platform. We have put together a complete tutorial that uses the MKR1000 to collect data about your Wi-Fi signal and send it to ThingSpeak for storage, analysis, and visualization.

The Arduino MKR1000 is a great starting point when learning about the “things” in IoT. The MKR1000 has a microcontroller, Wi-Fi module, encryption module, and a battery-charging circuit. It’s easy to get started and once you get it connected to ThingSpeak, you have a lot of “cloud power”. ThingSpeak has a suite of apps to allow the Arduino to post messages to Twitter, do data analysis,

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Cinetica has released to Google Play, a new app to see ThingSpeak charts on Android smartphones and tablets. The app is called ThingView and has already reached 5,000 installs on Android devices!

Even if you do not have devices and sensors sending data to ThingSpeak, you can still use ThingView to see public channels. For example, if you want to see the charts created by sensors in my house, just add Channel ID 9 to ThingView. You see charts of light levels and temperature generated by my house.

Check out

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Hackster.io announced that ThingSpeak is now a platform on their project sharing website!

The ThingSpeak platform joins the likes of Amazon Echo, ESP8266 Wi-Fi, and Particle.io platform. ThingSpeak users can easily document, share, and reproduce hardware and Internet of Things projects using Hackster.io. We are already off to a great start with 13 documented projects and tutorials and 31 community members. Check out our platform on Hackster.io to discover great projects and build your own IoT

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Loren Shure, a blogger at MATLAB Central, has written a new blog post about Eric Wetjen’s Counting Cars and Analyzing Traffic project. Eric uses a Raspberry Pi and webcam to capture traffic data outside of the MathWorks headquarters in Natick, MA. All of the traffic data is stored on a public ThingSpeak channel, so you will be able to use it to learn data analysis with the built-in MATLAB Analysis and Visualizations apps in ThingSpeak.

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My power meter at my house reports its power every few minutes. I capture that data and send it to ThingSpeak. The value reported is the total kilowatt-hour (kWh). I would love to see the maximum value over an hour versus randomly reported values over an hour. With the release of MATLAB R2016a, ThingSpeak users have access to a new suite of data analysis features. One of them is movmax – with movmax, I now can look at my ThingSpeak data over time and figure a moving window of maximum values. This new feature is highly customizable for your application, but I will show you how I use it.

My data over an hour looks like this: 803, 919, 724, 1349, 1500, 602, 549, 899, 1678, 1577

Using movmax, I can

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Julien Vanier over at Hackster.io created a new tutorial showing you how to get started with the Internet of Things using the new Particle Electron and ThingSpeak.

The Electron is a new 3G connected IoT device using cellular data and works anywhere you can get 3G in the United States. It is really awesome to plug-in a device and get it connected without the issues of Wi-Fi. This development kit also makes it possible to build battery-powered, mobile sensors. Good thing that ThingSpeak supports GPS data and offers sensor data analytics.

Check out Julien’s tutorial to go “

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Have you ever wondered how long it will take to get an Uber at your location? This project uses ThingSpeak to log the ETA for an Uber service based on your latitude and longitude. We will use ThingSpeak’s MATLAB Analysis and TimeControl apps to track Uber’s ETA over time.

The Uber API allows you to pass a latitude and longitude to determine the estimated time of arrival for an Uber car. The API also allows you to schedule a car. I have made a button that requests an Uber car and also schedules an Uber at the right time.

MATLAB Analysis Code

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Chris Hayhurst uses a solar water heater at his house to lower energy costs and use hot water in his house heated up by the sun. Chris is a consulting manager for The MathWorks and partnered with the IoT team to use ThingSpeak to collect data about his system and use ThingSpeak’s built-in MATLAB app to analyze it. In this project, Adarsh and I are going to show you how to send alerts when events are detected in the data by using the MATLAB Analysis app.

Chris’ home solar water heating system is an example of an IoT application that uses multiple sensors to collect data about a physical system.  Chris’s water heater measures ambient temperature, stored water temperature, collector temperature, and pump speed. All of this data gets collect by ThingSpeak and stored in Channel 29633.

On days when the stored water temperature exceeds 50°C (122°F),

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Slack is a team collaboration tool to make your work life simpler. It is an extremely popular way to receive messages from team members all in one place and integrate with external web services. One possible integration is with ThingSpeak. ThingSpeak is an open data platform for the Internet of Things. Devices all around the world are using ThingSpeak to collect data from sensors and send data to apps and other devices. In the not too distant future, things will be a part of your team. Relevant equipment statues, sensor readings, and updates will inform decisions and will be shared among team members and other Slack services.

By following our 

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Arduino has published a tutorial for their WiFi 101 Shield that sends data to ThingSpeak. The Arduino WiFi Shield 101 is a powerful Internet of Things shield with crypto-authentication that connects your Arduino or Genuino board to the internet using WiFi.

You only need a few things to build a light and temperature sensor that writes data to ThingSpeak:

Once you have the circuit built, you create a ThingSpeak channel, connect the Arduino WiFi 1010 to your Wi-Fi

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element14 is hosting a free webinar, “How To Use MATLAB and Simulink With ThingSpeak“, a free webinar hosted by Eric Wetjen of MathWorks. Join the webinar live on November 12, 2015 at 10am EST or watch a recording at a later time.

This webinar will show how you can use MATLAB and Simulink with ThingSpeak, an Internet of Things data collection platform. ThingSpeak can be used to collect, analyze and act on data sent from devices such as Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. To illustrate this, a car counter is implemented overlooking a busy highway using a Raspberry Pi 2 and a webcam.  In this demonstration, Simulink is used to deploy the car-counting algorithm on the

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Here at our headquarters we have a weather station collecting lots of weather data and sending it to ThingSpeak. We have made that data public for use in your own projects.

We write the temperature and humidity values from the weather station to a ThingSpeak channel. At some point in the project, we started to wonder about dew point calculations. We wrote some MATLAB code that combined the temperature and humidity to calculate dew point. I did this using the ThingSpeak app, “MATLAB Analysis”. You can try this out with ThingSpeak now by signing in, selecting

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We are thrilled to announce the official ThingSpeak Communication Library for Arduino and Particle devices. This library enables an Arduino or other compatible hardware to write or read data to or from ThingSpeak, an open data platform for the Internet of Things with built-in MATLAB analytics and visualization apps.

In the Arduino IDE, choose Sketch/Include Library/Manage Libraries. Click the ThingSpeak Library from the list, and click the Install button.

In the Particle/ Spark Web IDE, click the libraries tab, find ThingSpeak, and choose “Include in App”.

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Our very own Robert Mawrey produced a video introducing ThingSpeak and the Internet of Things.

ThingSpeak is an open data platform for the Internet of Things. Your device or application can communicate with ThingSpeak using a RESTful API, and you can either keep your data private, or make it public. In addition, use ThingSpeak to analyze and act on your data. ThingSpeak provides an online text editor to perform data analysis and visualization using MATLAB®. You can also perform actions such as running regularly scheduled MATLAB code or sending a tweet when your data passes a defined threshold. ThingSpeak is used for diverse applications ranging from weather data collection and analysis, to synchronizing the color of lights across

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The power of any tool becomes magnified when you start combing it with other tools. In this File Exchange project by Eric Wetjen, he demonstrates a powerful project by using a webcam to gather live traffic video of Route 9 in Natick, MA, using Simulink to deploy a car-counting algorithm to a Raspberry Pi, using MATLAB to perform analysis, and using ThingSpeak to collect and share the analyzed data with others.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi 2 and USB webcam acting as a sensor. The webcam picks up traffic flowing in both directions. Once the algorithm for detecting cars is modeled in Simulink, the algorithm gets deployed on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi sends the raw data to ThingSpeak on regular basis where it is

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When using the MATLAB Analysis app on ThingSpeak, the MATLAB function to represent date and time (datetime) allows you to represent points in time. You can also use datetime(‘now’),  datetime(‘today’), datetime(‘yesterday’), or datetime(‘tomorrow’) to create scalar datetimes at or around the current moment. Check out our documentation for more information about the datetime function.

On ThingSpeak, so far, the datetime function returned time set to UTC time zone by default. Starting at 10 am (EDT) on September 10th 2015, the datetime function will return date and time set to your account time zone (at https://thingspeak.com/account). This will allow you to read data from your channel with timestamps zoned to your local time zone instead of

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CheerLights is an Internet of Things project created by Hans Scharler that allows people’s lights all across the world to synchronize to one color set by Twitter. This is a way to connect physical things with social networking experiences and spread cheer at the same time. When one light turns red, they all turn red.

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CheerLights uses ThingSpeak to collect the latest color. We get the color value by following “CheerLights” on Twitter using the TweetControl app. When someone Tweets using “CheerLights” and a color name, the TweetControl app writes the color to the CheerLights Channel on

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For the last several years, I have been collecting data with ThingSpeak from devices all around my house. I have been tracking temperature, humidity, light levels, outside weather data, my deep freezer’s temperature, the state of My Toaster, and air quality metrics. I just recently started to think about what all of this data really means to me and if it’s good data to begin with. Wouldn’t it be great if I could explore my data in ThingSpeak?  Well, I am happy to say that with the latest upgrade to ThingSpeak, you can do just that.

We have been working with the MATLAB team at MathWorks to provide two new ThingSpeak Apps: MATLAB Analysis and MATLAB Visualizations. With these new built-in Apps, the ThingSpeak web service can automatically run MATLAB code. That makes it easier to gain insight into your data.

With the MATLAB Analysis app,

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Kickstarter projects pop up all of the time. Developers are looking to raise money for their projects so they can order a larger production run and gauge market reaction. A lot of recent projects are trying to address the “Maker Community” by making it easier to prototype connected devices and sensors. We just found one called, “nodeIT” from Sweden.

The nodeIT is centered around the ESP8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller and allows you stack other boards to extend its base functionality. Once the nodeIT is connected to your Wi-Fi network, you can easily publish data to ThingSpeak and visualize the results, such as data collected by a barometric sensor.

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Using the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, [shadowandy] built a dust sensor to measure dust levels in his house. The project incorporates the Shinyei PPD42NS dust sensor to do the measurements and posts the data to his ThingSpeak channel from data collection and reaction to dust levels.

The sensor records the PM10 and PM2.5 dust levels to get an accurate indication of the dust in the air. This project is a great example of how a little sensor could turn into something important for protecting machine shops, construction sites, and garages.

[via shadowandy /

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[Vegard Paulsen] created a solder iron that reports its usage and temperature to ThingSpeak and alerts him when it was left on. He uses an NodeMCU / ESP8266 Wi-Fi module to collect the data and post it to his ThingSpeak channel. Once the data is on ThingSpeak, he is able to send push notifications to his phone using the ThingSpeak React App.

Hackaday.com wrote an article about Vegard’s soldering iron connected to the Internet of Things. Here’s what they had to say:

The data pushes out to the ThingSpeak server which handles pushing data out to the bigger network, and data

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ThingSpeak user, Spencer, adapted a humidifier that sits in his basement. He is solving a common issue about humid basements. If your dehumidifier fails, you get wet things you have stored and then mold. Spencer created a humidity board using the DHT22 that measures humidity and then reports the data to his ThingSpeak Channel via the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. Once the data is stored in ThingSpeak, he uses ThingSpeak React to update Twitter when things get out of whack.

[via

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We are growing so quickly and adding a ton of new functionality that we don’t want to lose the User Experience (UX). We want you to be able to build Internet of Things projects in 5 minutes and gain insights, share data, and explore its potential without our software getting in the way.

To help us understand what you are thinking, we created a card sort activity. If you click the link, you can sort out our current functionality into categories. We will use the results over many ThingSpeak users to help us organize and improve our website and UX.

Thanks for

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What does an adorable hamster need? Internet of Things, but of course. Using ThingSpeak, ESP8266 Wi-Fi, and Arduino, Ángel from San Sebastián built a monitoring system for his hamster which is dubbed “RunnerHam“.

RunnerHam Tweets his distance and time when he takes a run on his wheel, “I’m done! 57.62m at 0.61m/s”. You can also check out his ThingSpeak Channel where he records lots

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Do you maintain Windows Servers? If so, you might want to track server resources. ThingSpeak accepts data from anything and fits perfectly for server monitoring, visualization, and analysis. [NotHans] released a PowerShell Script to report Windows Server disk free space to ThingSpeak. Once in ThingSpeak, use a ThingSpeak to visualize server resources and send alerts to low disk space with ThingSpeak React. Use this PowerShell Script as a starter script to send data to ThingSpeak from Windows-based systems. Check out the open source script on GitHub.

[via

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Head over to Instructables to learn how to make your plants Tweet using Spark Wi-Fi and ThingSpeak. Gregory Fenton created a project that monitors his plant’s soil moisture and then notifies him via Twitter when it is time to water it.

Greg built the project out of necessity to help his plants suffering from “localized drought”. Let’s hope his plants get proper watering and that other ThingSpeak users can quickly and easily build this project. Thanks for sharing!

[via

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A really awesome Kickstarter campaign called Blynk has came to our attention as users from their community and ours were asking if our systems could work together.

Blynk is an Android / iOS app that allows for a 5 minute, out-of-the-box experience for Internet of Things projects. Blynk already supports Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and in the future Electric Imp, Spark, The Airboard, Wildfire by Wicked Device, Tiny Duino, and ESP8266 Wi-Fi.

ThingSpeak offers the Internet of Things stable data storage, fast retrieval, data processing, data visualizations, and hooks to every web service possible. We are thrilled that Blynk is planning to support the open APIs of

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Over the past few months, we have seen the ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module take the DIY Internet of Things makers by storm. The main reason is the ESP8266 is less than $5US includes Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability to be programmed like a microcontroller. Another trend that we are seeing is that many of the ESP8266 modules are being connected to ThingSpeak web services. We are getting a lot questions every day, so we wanted to setup a new forum in our ThingSpeak Community dedicated to the ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module. Feel free to ask questions about ThingSpeak support with your ESP8266, we will do our best to provide answers and solutions on how to get the ESP8266 up and running quickly with ThingSpeak.

>>

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With over 20,000 active streams of “Internet of Things” data, the servers that make up ThingSpeak.com are humming.  We recently made extensive upgrades to the database system that stores all of data generated by things from all around the world.

“We switched to SSD drives for all of our database servers,” said Lee Lawlor, Lead Engineer of ThingSpeak. “All of the upgrades are live and available to the entire ThingSpeak Community!”

The improvements decreased response time dramatically and improved large data set retrieval by ten times.

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Chris Forsberg created an example Internet of Things project to track luggage using ThingSpeak, an Adafruit GSM Module, and an Arduino. He built a simple system to send data to ThingSpeak, such as latitude, longitude, and status data. ThingSpeak exposes a data channel API for any system like this to being able to store data and then process the data.

The idea is that it is frustrating waiting for luggage at the airport and wondering where it is and why it is not on the baggage carousel. With this project, you can track luggage from start to finish. The advantages are not only for the traveler, the airlines could track luggage as well and get quality statistics for each airport. And, the base system has many applications outside of travel such as the Automotive Industry.

Chris explains the project really well on his blog and with a YouTube video.

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We just created a FastLED and Arduino tutorial and Arduino Sketch to read in the latest CheerLights color and display it on FastLED compatible lights. CheerLights is a global network of colored lights that all synchronize to one color based on Twitter. People all around the world have built very creative displays of the latest CheerLights color. The new tutorial and Arduino sketch will make it easy to get started with

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Plugin Widgets allow you to create custom visualizations for your ThingSpeak Channels by using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. We just added a new feature that allows you to start with templates. We created a Google Gauge and a two axis chart widget!

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Check out ThingSpeak Docs for more information about Plugin

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We spent some time enhancing our TweetControl App. TweetControl allows you to control things with Twitter. You setup a TweetControl to listen for a keyword mentioned on Twitter and we execute any web service API call that you specify. Developers have created racing cars, political campaign trackers, and we use it for the CheerLights project.

As more and more users create TweetControls, the service started slowing down. We have enhanced how the service works and now you get instant TweetControls!

In an Instragram video sending a Tweet and changing the CheerLights color, you will see that there is little delay between sending the Tweet and executing the control command to change the colors on his Christmas tree.

Learn more about

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TimeControl can be used to send Tweets automatically at predetermined times.  In this tutorial, we’ll be sending a Tweet every weekday with the current time and the current CheerLights color.

The first step is to link a Twitter account to ThingSpeak.

Next, we’ll create a new TimeControl with the following values:

Save this TimeControl and you’re finished.  Every

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[noel portugal] is at it again! This time Noel created a simple Wi-Fi based sensor data logger using ThingSpeak, the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, and a digital temperature sensor. At the heart of the project is a low-cost Wi-Fi module that could be the basis for many Internet of Things projects.

Everything you need to know in order to build your own sensor logging project is on Noel’s Instructables.

[via

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A ThingSpeak App is a service offered by ThingSpeak that runs in the cloud to help you build connected projects and release connected products for the Internet of Things. We are happy to announce today that we are releasing a new app and we are excited to see what you do with it!

TimeControl is a web service hosted by ThingSpeak that executes any type of HTTP service call or sends Tweets at predetermined times or schedules. We now offer one-time commands and weekly recurring schedules for commands. TimeControl executes a ThingHTTP or ThingTweet command, and ThingHTTP can interface with any external Web Service API by doing SSL, Basic Auth, custom HTTP headers, GETs, POSTs, PUTs, and DELETEs. ThingHTTP simplifies connecting low-power, low-resource microcontrollers to complex web service APIs such as Twilio, Xively, and Amazon. When you combine TimeControl + ThingHTTP, you get scheduled triggers to any web service you can imagine and scheduled

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It’s Throwback Thursday!

We have come a long way since building cloud platforms for connected devices – now known as “The Internet of Things”. Here’s what our first website for the ThingSpeak project looked like 5 years ago…

Get started with IoT now:
Visit ThingSpeak.com or fork the project on

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ThingSpeak user [DodBasim]  requested an additional field inside of the ThingSpeak Data Channel. We named this new field “metadata”. This field works like the “status” field, but allows you to post any type of extra data along with your ThingSpeak Data Channel. An example would be to use the “metadata” field to store a JSON object that you want to parse with your application.

The full ThingSpeak Channels API is available on ThingSpeak Docs.

[via ThingSpeak

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ThingSpeak can be used to easily monitor CPU usage %, memory usage %, and disk usage % on any Linux machine connected to the internet.

First, create a new Channel, and fill out the field names as follows: Field 1 = “CPU Usage (%)”, Field2 = “Memory Usage (%)”, Field 3 = “Disk Usage (%)”.

Next, add the open-source server statistics script to your server, which can be found at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iobridge/thingspeak/master/lib/server_stats.sh

Inside the script there’s an API Key variable, which should be replaced with your specific Channel’s API Key (leave the single quotes, and only replace the X’s): api_key='XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'

For the script to work properly, install the “bc” package

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The servers behind ThingSpeak have been slammed with data from all kinds of IoT devices and applications. We recently upgraded the entire backend of ThingSpeak and increased capacity to support our growth. One of the key decisions in our redesign was to select Phusion Passenger Enterprise to power the ThingSpeak “Internet of Things” API. Phusion Passenger’s “hybrid evented, multi-threaded and multi-process design” is perfect for the Internet of Things pattern for applications.

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server for Ruby, Python, Node.js and Meteor web apps. It makes web app deployments a lot simpler and less complex, by managing your apps’

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Once your data gets into ThingSpeak, you than want to do something with it. A first step is to see the data. If the data are sensor values from a Nest thermostat for example, then you want to see it as a chart. We added a new way to visualize your data by adding Spline Charts! Spline Charts are super easy to create with ThingSpeak, just add “type=spline” to your ThingSpeak Chart API call. (And of course, once you have it as a chart, you may want to embed it on our ioBridge Dashboard application.)

Here’s what the new Spline Chart looks like:
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Here’s a

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Things want to speak…

We keep hearing about how many Billions and Billions of things there will be connected. Just think about how much data that they will create! Yep, it’s Big Data, or even, Bigger Data. ThingSpeak is the only open data platform specifically designed for the Internet of Things available ‘in the cloud’ or on your own network to capture and distribute data from things.

When we look out into the Cosmos, we see Billions and Billions of stars and keep a fond memory of Carl Sagan in our hearts. As we connect this planet, we can’t but think of the scale and the magnitude that IoT will bring. Using this inspiration, we launched the new read more >>

Build Open Data Applications with Electric Imp and ThingSpeak!

Electric Imp is a connectivity platform for connecting Wi-Fi devices to cloud services, much like RealTime.io and Iota Wi-Fi modules and Spark.io. Some Electric Imp module’s come in an SD card form factor and adds Wi-Fi connectivity to what’s connected to the Electric Imp module. Access to the Electric Module happens via the Electric Imp cloud. While connectivity is simplified with the Electric Imp system, you will need a data service like ThingSpeak to complete the Internet of Things experience. Once data from Electric Imp devices are in ThingSpeak, you can easily build applications and interactivity

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[Marcus Olsson] of slickstreamer made a battery-powered temperature logger using ThingSpeak to store and visualize the data collected. He chose the Electric Imp Wi-Fi module for connectivity. The project is complete with a 3D printed case.

All of the source code to connect Electric Imp to ThingSpeak and the 3D printer design files are available on Marcus’ blog ‘slickstreamer‘.

[

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CAVA created a cigar humidor with a social life. A humidor stores cigars in a humidity controlled environment to maintain freshness, but this special humidor sends the humidity sensor value to ThingSpeak and alerts Twitter when you need to add water. The project uses a humidity sensor and an Arduino Ethernet to post the data to the ThingSpeak API and ThingTweet to send messages to Twitter.

Mi Humidor de Cigarros conectado a Internet por medio de un

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In 2013, ThingSpeak was used in 158 countries and territories. The vast majority of the traffic came from countries in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. ThingSpeak is growing quickly around the world!

The Top 10 Internet of Things Countries*

*According to ThingSpeak Usage

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Introducing… TalkBack!

We have developed a new ThingSpeak App and it is available now to all ThingSpeak Users.

The new TalkBack App allows devices to check ThingSpeak for commands to execute. TalkBack is perfect for battery-powered devices that need to sleep most of the time and wake up to see if there is anything to do and then go back to sleep, like a door lock for example. The lock is mostly going to be asleep to save battery power, but it can wake up periodically and check TalkBack or be woken up by a button press to see if it should be opened or not.

Devices powered by ThingSpeak and now with TalkBack will be able to both push sensor data to the ThingSpeak Cloud and check TalkBack if any commands are available all in one request. To get started, we have the complete TalkBack API Documentation and an

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[Andrew Bythell] created a ThingSpeak Java Client for the complete ThingSpeak API. This Java Client makes it really easy for Java (or Processing) developers to add cloud connectivity to applications and non-networked devices. “The purpose of the ThingSpeak Java client is to enable non-networked Device-to-ThingSpeak gateways and other applications for performing advanced analysis of data feeds,” said Andrew.

So, by using Java, a simple “Hello World” app becomes this easy…

All of the

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ThingSpeak is growing quickly these days. Our traffic is high and the user growth is soaring. Thanks to everyone for your interest and patience as we continue to stabilize, add more servers, and add more features to help with your Internet of Things projects.

In order to help developers find open data inside of ThingSpeak Channels, we created a new API for searching the public ThingSpeak Channels.

Here are the Public ThingSpeak Channels. We order the channels by activity and completeness. Channels may be tagged and this helps find data that you might find interesting for your application. We also have API commands that you can pass to the ThingSpeak Channel API to return the public

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For the third holiday season in a row, the CheerLights project is gearing up. The idea behind CheerLights is to show that we are all connected by synchronizing the color of lights around the world. Christmas lights are a staple around the holidays and with Internet-connected lights, the color of your lights matches the color of everyone else’s lights.

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It has been a real treat watching this project evolve as more and more people add lights… and other things. Things like Android and iPhone apps that check the latest color of CheerLights,

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Dexter Industries launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign this past summer to build and release the BrickPi. The BrickPi turns the Raspberry Pi computer into a robotics and sensing platform for LEGO® MINDSTORMS®. Since the wrap up of the campaign, users have jumped on board making cool projects using the BrickPi including a step-by-step tutorial using ThingSpeak to

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[Marcus Olsson] from Slickstreamer created a solar-powered temperature logger using the Electric Imp Wi-Fi module to push data up to ThingSpeak to store and visualize the data collected by his sensors. Marcus provides a parts list and a how-to on his blog. The temperature sensor, solar panel, and solar charger are all readily available parts from Adafruit.

Looking over the code for the Electric Imp, it looks pretty easy to

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The Open Hardware Summit is September 6th, 2013 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. For the third year, ThingSpeak is sponsoring the event!

The OHS is an amazing experience. You get to meet all the Open Source Hardware heroes that are pushing this movement forward. This year there are many talks and panels covering all aspects of the open source hardware movement. Our part in all this is to push open platforms to connect all that open hardware. ThingSpeak is growing very quickly supporting the open hardware and software for advancement of the Open Source Internet of Things.

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Here’s another contest winner for Internet of Things Contest (aka The Easiest Contest Ever) – Part 2:

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For more information and Python source code, visit MY NERD JOURNAL.

[via MY NERD

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When we first launched “The Easiest Contest Ever”, we had 300 users and a dream. This time around the ThingSpeak Community has grown to over 10,000 users and channels! The first contest yielded many interesting projects and we wanted to see what you can come up with a second time.

Drum roll… We are announcing, “The Easiest Contest Ever… Part 2”.

All you have to do is build a project using a ThingSpeak web service, post a demo / how-you-done-it video on YouTube or Vimeo, and tell us about it. We are giving away 20 gift certificates to SparkFun valued at $50 each. And… selecting our favorite projects for bonus prizes. Leave a comment with questions. This contest is open to

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[donmatito] created an Indoor Environmental Quality Station based on the Arduino platform and uses Bluetooth for connectivity to ThingSpeak cloud services. The great news is that Don completely documented the project at Instructables for others to learn from and add to. By using ThingSpeak he has made it easy to get access to the data with an app and share the data with other users.

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[Risto] from Supermechanical wrote a tutorial on how to use the Twine with ThingSpeak web services such as Data Logging and Charting. The tutorial explains how you can use the Twine’s easy-to-use sensor module to trigger events and push data over to ThingSpeak. This opens up the data captured by Twine and allows for all kinds of new applications.

The Supermechanical team put this combination of Twine and ThingSpeak to use right away. They created a “Productivity Quantification” system to capture events around the office and try to determine how productive they are. They were able to track how much coffee they were drinking, snacks they were eating, toilets they were flushing, and things they were finishing. The results are a quantified picture of office productivity and a beautiful display

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[fredblabla] created a video tutorial on how to make a chart with ThingSpeak. This tutorial is in French and clearly explains how to setup a channel, post data to a channel, customize the charts, and add plugins to your ThingSpeak Channel page.

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Merci beaucoup.

[via

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Thanks to the very active ThingSpeak community, we have been able to make some updates to the open source ThingSpeak API and web app. We also have a major new release coming. The latest updates allow ThingSpeak to be installed without dependency on the Internet. This means you can run this on an embedded web server with no Internet connection. This is perfect for when you want to log sensor data behind a firewall and build apps that do not require (or have) remote connectivity.

We want to send a special thanks to powermik, oiotoshi, sekjal, and 

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We have updated our ThingTweet Tutorial to cover the Arduino Ethernet and the new Arduino IDE (v1 and above). ThingTweet is a ThingSpeak App that allows you to send Twitter status updates via your Arduino microcontroller with an Ethernet shield or with Ethernet integrated onto one board. Our Arduino examples for ThingSpeak and ThingSpeak Apps have been moved to GitHub, so that you can easily download, modify, and contribute

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TinyCLR master user [Duke Nukem] created a project using the Microsoft Gadgeteer and ThingSpeak Internet of Things web services. The Gadgeteer allows modular hardware development with plug-and-play sensors and controls. Mr. Nukem built a real-time gas sensor monitoring system that uploads its data to a ThingSpeak Channel. Once the data is on ThingSpeak, other developers can tap into the data and use it for control systems or for creating apps that process, analyze, and visualize the data. Duke also posts data and warnings to social networks such as Twitter via ThingSpeak’s ThingTweet web service.

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Duke

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Kickstarter over the past few months has been the platform of choice for new Internet of Things hardware being developed. Many projects are an Arduino and another thing attached to it. While some of those projects are cool, they are not pushing the Internet of Things forward. Recently, Kickstarter changed their policies about hardware projects and also opened up the platform to the United Kingdom. This is forcing the projecteers to come up with more developed and innovative ideas that help differentiate themselves from rehashed projects and ideas.

One that has piqued our interest is the EVE Alpha for the Raspberry Pi created by Ciseco from Nottingham, United Kingdom. Wireless is a key part of the Internet of Things as with wireless we can connect more things in a

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.NET Micro Framework Developer [paolopat] created a client for the ThingSpeak platform. This allows any device that supports the .NET Micro Framework to access ThingSpeak web services by using the μPLibrary 1.8. The library is available on NuGet Gallery and abstracts the ThingSpeak API. The library works with the popular Netduino Plus and other devices running .NET Micro Framework.

Paolo says,

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The Open Hardware Summit is September 27th, 2012 in New York City at Eyebeam. For the second year, ThingSpeak is sponsoring the event!

The OHS was a blast last year. We got to meet all the Open Source Hardware heroes that are pushing this movement forward. Our part in all this is to push open platforms to connect all that open hardware. ThingSpeak is growing very quickly as you see projects pop-up every day. We will be releasing our two-year numbers and the latest stats just before the Open Hardware Summit. Just a hint about what you will hear… we doubled in size over the last 6 months!

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The community from RS Components created a Scalextric Slot Car Race that is powered by your tweets. Two cars went head-to-head last week with a live Twitter race between a red and blue car. The cars move based on the number of Tweets that included their hashtag. If you want the blue car to win, you needed to Tweet, “Go #RSBlueTeam”. The team wrote a web service like TweetControl that pulls in tweets from the Twitter Stream and distributes commands to an Arduino that controls the track. This is another great project that further demonstrates how social intersects with technology and marketing. Go Tweet Racer!

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ThingSpeak user, “SolarInKrimpen”, from Rotterdam, Netherlands, created a solar power monitoring system that reports data collected by solar panels and feeds the data to web services such as ThingSpeak, Cosm, and PVoutput. They are collecting data such as, AC Wattage collected by a Pulse Counter, Total KWH per day, temperature of the solar panels, and the carbon offset.

Over at the Netduino forums, we found the source code for the Netduino and HTML for the ThingSpeak gauges for embedding the solar panel data on a website.

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If you use Ruby to write programs and apps, Daniel Treacy created a Ruby wrapper for the ThingSpeak API. This Gem makes it easy to access the ThingSpeak API inside of your Ruby code.

For more information, check out our tutorial and visit GitHub for the full source code. Thanks Daniel!

[via

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Kevin, from the brilliant minds at Philter Communications, created a gumball machine known as the Tweet-a-Tweat. This clever device encourages social media interaction. People who visit your office need to send a Tweet to @tweetatweat to get a tasty gumball. The idea is to stimulate your brand by offering a real-world interaction. The combination of social media+internet of things forms a powerful link and the “web of things” vision emerges. We love working with our partners to enable strong(er) relationships with customers, coworkers, and visitors; and ultimately seeing new ideas take shape.

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The technology behind Tweet-a-Tweat is Arduino + ThingSpeak — this is another powerful combination. The Gumball Machine is from

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Here’s another “Klink Family Adventure”. The Klink’s created a solar water heater monitor using an Arduino connected to multiple waterproof DS18B20 temperature sensors. What’s great about this project is that it has the complete schematic and source code for interfacing multiple sensors to ThingSpeak at the same time. This is a common request in the ThingSpeak forum, so we are glad to see the code in the wild. The application is great. Monitoring the yield of a solar water heating system allows you to keep track of efficiency and savings.

Here’s what the temperature looks like now in Australia:

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Check out the family’s blog for the source code and to learn how to

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Via Twitter, we caught wind of a project by a group of Rutgers University SCI ITI students. As their final project, the team built a working model of a smart home using sensors connected to ThingSpeak cloud services via Arduino and chipKit. They were able to embed their data and integrate with their Drupal-based website and show a live demonstration of the smart house. Lots of cool technology went into their project including a small scale model complete with balsa wood and Popsicle sticks. This proved to be a great way to show how their project works with other students and faculty.

This video that we discovered on YouTube is the team’s presentation. You will get to see ThingSpeak in action, live in front of an

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“You might have recently heard about ‘Internet of Things’. You may even be wondering what things are…”

We are starting a video tutorial series, so you can see how to get started with ThingSpeak right away. The first two videos are available now along with our 20 other tutorials for ThingSpeak. Check out the Tutorials section of the ThingSpeak Community website.

Introduction to the “Internet of Things” and ThingSpeak

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We have recently received a few email about accessing historical data. We even noticed some posts on other forums asking about older data.

All ThingSpeak Channels are continuous logs of data. Using API commands, you can access recent data and historical data. The default API parameters allow for easy access to recent data. To get access to older data, all you need to do is pass in a “start” and “end” parameter into a channel request.

Here is my feed from New Year’s Eve:

http://api.thingspeak.com/channels/9/feed.json?start=2011-12-31%2000:00:00&end=2012-01-01%2000:00:00

And remember, you can also do this with charts too:

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The team behind openPICUS has created an Application Note to help you jump-start your “Internet of Things” project by adding wireless technology with the Flyport and cloud services with ThingSpeak. Both of these projects are open source, changeable, and ready for all kinds of applications. This combination allows you build “new” things that tap into cloud services via ThingSpeak apps such as Channels for data logging, Charts for seeing data, ThingTweet for making things tweet, React to send alerts, and ThingHTTP to access web data such as weather reports.

Download the free Application Note, “Interfacing Flyport to ThingSpeak”, and the 

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We have update the documentation for the TweetControl app:

https://blogs.mathworks.com/iot/documentation/apps/tweetcontrol/

TweetControl allows you to monitor Twitter for trigger words to send ThingHTTP requests. The CheerLights project by ioBridge Labs uses TweetControl to update its ThingSpeak Channel so other lights around the world stay in sync with each other.

Why use TweetControl? Our app connects to the Twitter Streaming API. What this means to you is that you don’t have to keep polling Twitter

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It’s that time of year… holiday time and family time. I was inspired this time to create a project that brings us a little closer. Lights are a big part of the holidays and with CheerLights you can connect your lights to other lights via Twitter with a little help by ThingSpeak Apps.

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Since the project release, there has been much activity. A part from CheerLights being discussed on blogs like MAKE and

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Hans Scharler is stopping by the monthly meeting of the Pittsburgh Ruby Users Group. The topic on the agenda is ThingSpeak, an open source Ruby on Rails application for the Internet of Things. The meeting is scheduled for December 1, 2011 and starts at 7:30pm.

ThingSpeak is an open source web application and API to manage devices, to create device interactions, and to store data. Users can use the hosted version of ThingSpeak or setup instances on their own servers by getting the source code from GitHub. The technology behind ThingSpeak is Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0, EventMachine, Phusion Passenger, Nginx, and Memcached to form a highly scalable infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things and its data model requirements.

You use ThingSpeak to Send and Receive

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Everyone is expecting Hans to connect a turkey to the Internet today, but he has some limits. Although his house, office, and yard have more Internet connected things than you can imagine. Today, in the US is a day of rest, turkey (ham for Hans), football, napping, bickering, and giving thanks. So, we wanted to cross one item off of the list before the day starts, thank you everybody.

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[david] from Toute la Domotique adapted the Teracom box to connect to ThingSpeak web services for data logging of sensors. In his article, “Suivi de Température“, David covers the ThingSpeak integration in a 6 part tutorial written in French.

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FUBAR Labs, a Highland Park, NJ non-profit, is holding many upcoming courses on Arduino, Web Services, Custom PCB, and Electronics. On October 23, 2011, they will be holding a class on connecting Arduino to RESTful web services like ThingSpeak. You will learn to use node.js and jQuery to interact with hardware and web services.

Sign up for “Hacking REST web services with jQuery” at Eventbrite.

About FUBAR Labs:

Fair Use Building and Research (FUBAR) Labs is a Nonprofit Corporation that provides a location where people with common interests, usually in computers, technology, science, and crafts can meet and collaborate. We are an open community offering classes, workshops, study groups, and long term

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The Arduino team recently released the release candidate of Arduino 1.0 on Google Code. It’s a available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Version 1.0 of Arduino’s IDE includes enhancements to the GUI and additions and changes to the Arduino Hardware API. Since the release, we have been beta testing Arduino 1.0-rc1 and find the updates to be spot on. This is definitely a step forward. A big change that affects ThingSpeak Arduino Sketches is the inclusion of DHCP and DNS support to the Ethernet library, which was integrated by Adrian McEwen. We are able to use the new Arduino 1.0 to make it as easy as possible to connect the Arduino platform to the Internet. Download the latest Arduino IDE on Google Code.

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We are moving our Arduino Examples to GitHub to make it easier to copy, modify, and combine with your ideas. If you want to collaborate on creating the very best source code and examples for Arduino, feel free to contact us. We will be releasing our brand-new Arduino 1.0 sketches shortly. GitHub Speaks…

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Paulo is from Brazil and uses Portuguese as his primary language. He grabbed the English language file from our GitHub repository and translated it into Brazilian Portuguese. Now, when anyone from Brazil or someone set to Brazil (pt-BR) as a locale on their device visits ThingSpeak.com, the entire ThingSpeak web application is presented in Brazilian Portuguese.

Here’s what ThingSpeak is in Brazilian Portuguese: ThingSpeak é um projeto de Internet Aberta das Coisas feito pela ioBridge!

Thank you much, Paulo or should we say, “Muito obrigado,

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“…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Think Different.” – Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

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[via I am

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[lars] created a weather station from scratch using sensors and bits from SparkFun and Adafruit. Lars wanted to log weather data and access it from remotely. He built the weather station using humidity, temperature, pressure, and light sensors collecting data from his apartment in Ithaca, NY. Originally, Lars was collecting data with his own web application created with PHP and MySQL. He has since started publishing his data to ThingSpeak where others can view the data and potentially build applications.

Behind the scenes, Lars uses the Arduino microcontroller to collect data from the sensors and uses Processing to publish data to his read more >>

HomeVisionXL adds a ThingSpeak Plugin for environmental data logging to their home automation controller. HomeVisionXL “is a cross-platform tool for developing schedules for the HomeVision integrated home controller.” The plugin was created by ThingSpeak user bgardner and adds data logging capability to the HomeVision home automation system.

Visit the ThingSpeak

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You may not use Internet Explorer 6 anymore, but maybe a family member or a customer still uses it. And, you want them to be able to see your sensor data and applications. We also wanted to have the widest compatibility possible for the biggest audience. Our charts use JavaScript to give the viewer much more detail behind the data points themselves vs. static charts. However, we are dependent on what a user uses to see the charts. We have made some enhancements and now all versions of Internet Explorer since version 6 work great with ThingSpeak. Of course the charts work great on all other modern desktop / iPhone and Android mobile browsers.

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The Open Hardware Summit is September 15th, 2011 in New York City. The ThingSpeak team is thrilled to announce that we are sponsoring the event! We are excited to be a part of the summit and we will have stuff for the famous “goodie bag”.

Over the past few months of getting ThingSpeak to full speed, we have been inspired by the outpouring of projects and interaction with the open hardware community. So far, we announced integration with openPICUS which allows developers to create a completely open source wireless solution for the Internet of Things. There are many more announcements coming

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There’s a lot of activity in Pittsburgh these days. The new Bat Man movie is being filmed and HackPittsburgh is busy making amazing projects. And to top it off, HackPGH has invited ioBridge back to demo our latest gizmos and talk about our open source initiatives such as ThingSpeak. Everyone is invited to the demo at HackPittsburgh, so invite a friend. Power to those who solder!

ioBridge Demo Night

Friday, August 19 @ 7pm

HackPittsburgh Workshop [Google Map]

1936 5th Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA

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How will connected devices change our lives? We believe the future is going to be filled with connected devices and new applications will emerge. Everything from medical applications to energy management applications.

Just imagine what we can learn from all of our things? Maybe we can save resources as an article by Brian McCann suggests. He also mentions connecting things to ThingSpeak as the Web of Things is being built from the ground up! Our community of developers and users are growing by leaps and bounds and we will continue to contribute to the advancement of the Internet of Things!

Brian says,

The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects having an Internet presence. We’re not just talking about your computer, laptop, cellphone or even your TV here – we’re talking about everything. This includes your

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[david]  created a project that reads the temperature from a Filtrete 3M-50 Wi-Fi Thermostat and sends the data to ThingSpeak. He also grabs the latest temperature as reported by Yahoo Weather and sends it to be compare with his inside temperatures. Using ThingSpeak in this way gives David a historical view of his house temperatures and an indication of how well his installation is working in both the summer and winter months. Visit Davi’d weblog, “MyBlog4Fun“, for the script and project details.

[via

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Over on the Tenet Technetronics Blog there are some great posts about how to connect Arduino to ThingSpeak using Python as the middleware. Please check it out and thank them for putting together an awesome ThingSpeak Application Note and video. The video demonstrates publishing sensor data to the web using ThingSpeak and Python. The sensor data is collected by an Arduino MCU.

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openPICUS just released some new features for the FlyPort Wi-Fi module. openPICUS is an open source wireless platform that uses Wi-Fi and freeRTOS to connect things to the web. One new feature is hibernation mode for lower energy use with battery-powered applications. The other new feature is integration with ThingSpeak. All you have to do is download the ThingSpeak.com Library from openPICUS and use it with your FlyPort Wi-fi device. Now, you can sensors connected to ThingSpeak for data logging, visualizations, and access to all of the ThingSpeak apps, such as ThingTweet and ThingHTTP. Welcome to the Open Source Wireless Internet of Things!

From the openPICUS announcement:

A wide

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[eisenhowerj] recently posted in the forum about filtering out bad data. One data point can throw off a chart. There are two hidden API commands) that allow you to filter data between two values. This only works if your channel’s field as numeric data.

All you to do is add either the min or max parameter (or both) to an API call. This will filter out all other values except for the ones that meet the min or max condition. This applies to getting channel feeds and presenting charts.

For more information, check out the ThingSpeak API

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We recently updated the ThingSpeak Channel API to allow you to update a channel feed and send Tweets all in one request. All you have to do is send your Twitter username that’s linked to ThingTweet and what you want to Tweet with a standard update to your ThingSpeak Channel. You can update Twitter, track the location, and add status context all with one API call. Use this feature when you want to highlight certain data and share it with your friends and family. Visit the ThingSpeak API Documentation for more

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[sirleech] of Australian Robotics created a project based on the RESTduino libraries by Jason Gullickson for Arduino-based microcontrollers. RESTduino turns an Arduino into a RESTful device and gives you the ability to access it with structured URLs. In this project, sirleech extends RESTduino with some Python scripting so that a RESTduino device can update a ThingSpeak Channel. Visit GitHub for the complete project source

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[willnue] of NUEwire created a project for the “Make it Tweet Contest” over on Instructables.com sponsored by Adafruit. The contest is simple: make something tweet. If you use our ThingTweet app, sending a Tweet could not be easier. And, if you have an Arduino setup as a device on your ThingSpeak account, ThingTweet generates the Arduino sketch for you automatically. Here is the tutorial to help you get started with ThingTweet and Arduino: Update Twitter with ThingTweet and Arduino + Ethernet Shield.

willnue added the

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Big news!

The mashup community ProgrammableWeb indexed the ThingSpeak API and the ThingSpeak Chart API. We entered the category of “Other”. Just imagine what web developers will create now that they have the Internet of Things at their fingertips.

[via

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The Web of Things Workshop is Sunday, June 12, 2011 in San Francisco and features the latest research relating to the emerging Internet of Things tied to web services, sensors, objects, and everyday life. The Web of Things Workshop is held in conjunction with Pervasive 2011, the international conference on pervasive computing.

To get the imaginations primed, the workshop is holding a Web of Things Hackathon on Saturday, June 12, 2011 at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. The ideas behind the hackathon are to get a bunch of people together from varied fields, focus their creative energy, and build something. The ioBridge/ThingSpeak team

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Something stuck me today. You can learn from your sensor data. Why go to all of the trouble of logging data without ever taking a look at it and make adjustments? For example, knowing your energy use only helps if you can lower your power use. This is why most power monitoring apps grow stale. In some cases there is little you can do about your power use or you’re not given the tools to make an impact. Our goal with ThingSpeak is to make it super easy to connect things, collect data, share data, and make sense of it all. We wanted to re-confirm our commitment to you. We were spurred on by a recent Tweet from @WaterSim.

[Elad Salomons] of OptiWater noticed that his house

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[willnue] created Seriot which is a Windows-based serial bridge for sensors (and devices like Arduino and Netduino) and ThingSpeak web services. Seriot listens to serial commands and sends them to ThingSpeak without having to have a dedicated network connection at each sensor. Visit NueWire to download the Windows application and learn more about this project.

[via NueWire / Arduino

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We are ready to release a new app for the ThingSpeak Platform! The new app is called TweetControl – this app listens to Twitter for hashtags (#awesome)  and allows you to control anything that you can imagine. TweetControl is a mash up of  “The Internet of Things” and social networking. Now that Twitter has a Streaming API, we were able to build a scalable service to control anything in real-time via a social network.

Imagine an “Easy Button” for Twitter. All you have to is Tweet a hashtag from your Twitter account to control anything that has a web service API.

The applications for TweetControl are endless, and we are excited to see what you come up with. Check out the

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[rob myers] created a dynamic web page that changes based on the colours in his studio. Rob takes  a picture of his studio with a webcam, processes the image with Python, and uploads the colour data to a ThingSpeak channel. The web page uses jQuery to access the ThingSpeak API and dynamically update his web page inspired by the colors.

We love the combination of storing data in  a channel and using the API to update a webpage dynamically based on the current “mood” of an area. We also love the idea of using a webcam as a passive sensor since almost everybody has

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[outlet] has created a project that has it all – Netduino! ioBridge! XBee! ThingSpeak! He wanted to use the ioBridge IO-204 as a serial gateway for XBee (ZigBee) wireless sensors connected to ThingSpeak. The XBee radios are attached to a pair of Netduinos that send the data serial data via the IO-204 to the ioBridge Serial Web Services API. At this point, ioBridge relays the data to ThingSpeak, but could send the data to any website.

Outlet has created a detailed Instructables to guide you on how he created the project. This project is at prototype level, but we could see how this could be packaged into an efficient setup and used for many applications that require wireless sensors and remote monitoring and reporting. This is on the same lines as the

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On a Chestnut farm in New Zealand, you will find a bit of technology to help protect a bore pump. [Andrew] has created a pump monitor based on a PICAXE microcontroller, IR counter, and wireless connection to report the pump status remotely to ThingSpeak. He wanted to know if the pump was running too long and the only way to know definitively was to monitor the pump and save historical data. If the pump is running too long, the pump would be damaged and use more power than its fair share.

[via JAQ’s

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[Paul Asselin] was curious to see how long he spent showering in an effort to reduce energy and resource consumption. Paul had a bunch of parts laying around, an Arduino, Ethernet Shield, Real-time Clock module, and an RFID reader. He decided to make a system that allows you to “check in” when you shower and upload the data for analysis to ThingSpeak.

Paul says,

I wanted to know how much time I was spending under the shower each day, especially in these environmentally conscious times. The benefits of that are that I can perhaps save some money on the water bills and also study the effect of temperature on my showering time.

[via read more >>

If you are building an app using Microsoft .NET / C#, you don’t have to start from scratch. [Brett] created a Microsoft .NET class for the entire ThingSpeak API. He included the general data fields, as well, as geolocation and status updates. You can download the class on Brett’s blog to help you get started with a ThingSpeak App very quickly.

Brett says,

ThingSpeak is a cool application that allows you to send it any kind of data you want graphed.  Your imagination is the limitation. Some ideas of what can be graphed:

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[Frank] has created a complete tutorial on how to publish sensor data to ThingSpeak via the mbed prototyping platform. He specifically shows you how to connect the mbed to DS1620 temperature sensor and push data to a ThingSpeak data channel. From the seed of this project, we can see many applications for monitoring temperatures and sending push messages to the iPhone using Prowl when sensor data gets out-of-bounds.

Frank says,

This project uses a mbed microcontroller (LPC1768 ARM Cortex-M3) to monitor temperature using a DS1620 (digital temperature sensor IC), retrieve the time via NTP (network time protocol), and then log the current

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[Chris Lee] of Australian Robotics created a project that uses ThingSpeak as a resource monitor for a computer. His project explains how he uses Python to send HTTP POST requests to a ThingSpeak Channel. The data that he is sending is CPU and memory usage. This application could be used for monitoring servers and verifying uptime.  Chris also makes use of the ThingSpeak Charts API to visualize the data in real-time.

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The latest Python code to interface to ThingSpeak is available on GitHub.

[via Australian

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Thanks for all of the submissions to the Internet of Things Contest (aka The Easiest Contest Ever). We received just over 20 projects and we will honor all of them with a gift certificate. I told you it was easy. If you happen to be working on a project now, send it in. You never know…

This week we will be dispatching the SparkFun gift certificates and also blogging about the projects. There were some really cool ones and tons of code for the community to start using right away. There’s even commercial interest in using the platform for an upcoming product. Yeah!

The contest was definitely a success. We needed to get some creative developers to check out all of the features. We also received a bunch of feedback for new features. One feature stood out from the rest,

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When you are retrieving data from a ThingSpeak channel you have many options and formats to choose from. We wanted to highlight a few options that are easily overlooked.

Let’s say you have an Arduino and you want to get the last value in a channel. You could get your feed and then write some parsing code to extract the data that you are looking for. It’s a waste of code space and also fills your finite buffers on your microcontroller. Let the cloud do the work and give you just the value you are looking for.

Here’s how you would get our light levels: Live Demo

[cce]http://api.thingspeak.com/channels/9/field/1/last.txt[/cce]

You can even add data to the response. Maybe you have

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To celebrate our 300th ThingSpeak channel, we are announcing, “The Easiest Contest Ever”.

All you have to do is build a project using a ThingSpeak web service, take a photo (if it applies), and writeup a description / how-to on your blog, Instructables, or email us the details. We are giving away 20 gift certificates to SparkFun valued at $50 each.

Some ideas: Use a USB data logger with ThingSpeak Importer, track a car using ThingSpeak geolocation services, create a mashup using ThingSpeak Plugins…wait…we have said too much. We want to be surprised by what you come up with, so feel free to get

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If you look at our homepage, you will see a chart dynamically updating itself with the latest data from a light sensor. We did this by using a combination of our feed API and the Highcharts package. We decided to make this an option in our Charts API. So, all you have to do is say, “dynamic=true” and the charts will automatically add new data from your channel to the chart. It’s almost magic if it was not all JavaScript! Visit the ThingSpeak Documentation for the Charts API for more information on this feature and all of the other options for your

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Do you have a device that stores data on a USB drive? These devices are a common way to track sensors with a higher resolution or when you do not have an Internet connection for that device. The issue is that the data is stuck on the drive. We have solved that with the ThingSpeak Importer!

All you have to do now is upload your data file to ThingSpeak and you can instantly see charts, run any of the data processing commands that we have like Rounding, Averaging, Summing, Median, and Timescaling, and have the data accessible from our APIs.

To get started, select a ThingSpeak Channel and click Import Data. The file needs to be in a CSV format and include a date stamp with your data. Otherwise, we will do the rest. For more questions, checkout the documentation or ask for help in the

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[foxxjnm] tracks his office temperature with ThingSpeak. He had a temperature probe and a FEZ Cobra development board lying around, so he decided to connect them to the ThingSpeak API.

I have been playing around with the ThingSpeak API a little this week. I decided to get my FEZ Cobra reporting temperature data from my office at work. Why a temperature sensor you ask?… Because I had one laying around.. That was good enough for me, guess I’m simple like that.

[via codefox

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If you look around your house or office, you will see a bunch of things. Things are just sitting there. Things like your coffee maker, toaster, florescent lights, copy machine, alarm clock…

Have you ever noticed that you keep a schedule on Google Calendar, but every night you set your alarm clock? What if the alarm clock was connected to Google Calendar, would that thing be more useful? You always seem to be replace the toner in the copy machine, right in the middle of when you trying to copy your presentation. Thanks for the warning thing! Is someone in your room when I am not there? Maybe your lights could tell you.

We built ThingSpeak from the ground up to give things a voice. If we listen maybe they will tell a meaningful story. ThingSpeak can connect things, log data, track things, and make

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The ThingSpeak API is now on GitHub! You can setup the application on your local network or on a web server in the cloud and run the full ThingSpeak API dedicated for your application. With everyone being able to spin their own web of things, we look forward to seeing how the API evolves and the changes you make.

Support for ThingSpeak is available on the ThingSpeak Community site which features a Blog, Forum, Documentation, and Tutorials. The documentation is the same

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ThingSpeak forum user “nr” requested a feature to clear a channel (without having to delete the channel and then build a new one). We recently added the feature under the Channel settings. Often while testing your code you are sending random data to your channel. This feature allows you to reset the channel after you had a chance to perfect your code.

Thanks for the feature request, “nr”. Take this as an open invitation to everyone else…If you have questions, comments, or feature requests, feel free to send them

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We just added a new feature called Devices. This allows you to register your home-brew devices and receive a globally unique MAC address. Some devices do not come with a MAC address so often the MAC address used is the one that the example source code is using. If you end up putting two Ethernet or WiFi devices on the same local network with the same MAC address, odd situations will occur and will not be obvious to troubleshoot. The Devices App from ThingSpeak can generate a random MAC address or generate a globally unique address from our address pool. We have a limit to the number of global addresses we can generate, so feel free to jump in and grab one for your Thing.

In the future, we will add more features to the Devices application. If there is interest, we are thinking

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ioBridge just added a new feature that allows you to add custom apps and widgets to the ioBridge Dashboard application. This means you can aggregate data from many sources and one of the examples is embedding a ThingSpeak chart. You can also embed ThingSpeak Plugins and external video and truly have a custom dashboard. The new HTML App allows for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create web service mashups without having to run another web server to build applications. SSL is included in both ioBridge and ThingSpeak applications, so everything is secure and ready to go out of the box.

[via ioBridge News and

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After a couple of weeks of open registration for ThingSpeak, we have received many email, questions, and comments. Over 100 ThingSpeak channels have been created so far and the APIs are getting a work out. We have implemented a number of changes to the API, added some new apps, and wrote up 4 new tutorials since our last update. We wanted to take a second and say thanks for the feedback. We look forward to your projects and seeing what new things we can create together.

Here are the latest updates:

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Here’s a project from ShadowLord himself. It’s a Twitter-like front-end using HTML, CSS, and jQuery to read a ThingSpeak Channel from his house.

With this project, I wanted to take it a few steps further and build something from the ground up that’s focused on collecting enormous amounts of data from everyday objects, allowing devices to interact with each other, and building applications to present some meaning.

[via I am ShadowLord

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Our things can tell us a story…if they have a voice…if they are connected. What can our things tell us? How about how much power they use? How about if someone is in your house? How about your toaster updating Twitter? A new generation of products and services for “connected things” are being created as we speak. Be a part of the story…

ThingSpeak is an open web of things platform to allow devices to interact with web services, apps, and things. ThingSpeak is open to any type of data from devices and applications.  ThingSpeak is a cloud service…things-as-a-service (TaaS)? ThingSpeak is open now.

Features:

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Join ThingSpeak contributor Hans Scharler at one of the O’Reilly Ignite events Thursday, February 10, 2011 at Brillobox in Pittsburgh, PA. Hans will be giving a talk entitled, “Tangled in a Web of Things”, which is about the current fragmented state of the Internet of Things and the future of connected devices and services. There will be other great talks, so make sure to join us at Ignite Pittsburgh!

[via ioBridge News and

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No, it’s not summer in North America yet but many people are counting down the days till the weather turns warm, especially with the east coast having just endured a snowy drubbing from Mother Nature!

I’ve been following the concept of an “Internet of Things” for a few years now and it’s definitely something else that’s heating up! Whether as citizens as sensors or being able to ‘Google your keys‘ bridging the technology most of us take for granted now, the Internet, into the physical realm holds tremendous promise.

However, we know there’s more to it then running an Ethernet cable to your car, or plugging in your teddy bear. The networks we take for granted now, despite their vast capabilities, weren’t designed for this new wave

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“mattyw” shows us how to read a thermistor temperature sensor with an Arduino and use a python script to update a ThingSpeak Channel.

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We are about to release ThingSpeak, a web service to enable the Open Internet of Things. ThingSpeak is under testing and the progress is going very well. The first group of beta testers are building interesting applications right out of the gate.

To help us cover the the emerging Internet of Things, SkyNet, and singularity, we have invited jay@thecapacity, to contribute to our blog. We look forward to his guest posts and his perspective as things move so fast.

Contact us if you are interested in testing the new

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