Pachube feeds around the world

The main Pachube map (viewable at http://www.pachube.com/) only renders the last 600 feeds to have been updated, which is just a fraction of the available feeds. We limit it in order to keep the render time of the map down (which on older computers and browsers now takes a few seconds). I wanted to get a better idea of active feeds around the world so I made a quick php script using Pachube's search API to create a high res PNG that maps about 5000 active feeds - see above, click to view in high resolution. I didn't realise until I did this that we have feeds in the Antarctica and the Arctic as well as several in the Pacific!

xClinic/Pachube/01SJ Environmental Health Project selected!

The call for environmental health projects using Pachube, issued several months ago in conjunction with the Environmental Health Clinic and 01SJ festival, resulted in some great projects but today we're delighted to announce the selected project is by Kitchen Budapest!
From the Zero1 blog post:

The concept proposed byKitchen Budapest, Beat Your Mouse Movement, strives to balance the growing hours spent in front of computer screens by offering a playful solution that motivates people to walk in order to get more exercise and become more conscious about their health and city environment. Beat Your Mouse Movement will consist of a web/desktop application called “Mousey” that tracks the mouse pointer and another one called “Steppy” that counts steps–creating a playful competition to literally beat the mouse. By tracking and analyzing this data they can encourage people to go further distances in the real world than in the virtual one. Project contributors include: Irma Földényi, László Kiss, Melinda Sipos, and Andi Sztojanovits.

We'll be tracking progress on the project over the next couple of months but look out for the final project at 01SJ in August!

Pachube presentation at Internet of Things Europe 2010

At the recent Internet of Things Europe 2010 conference we were delighted to announce that Current Cost's new Bridge device will use Pachube Enterprise for its backend data management. See the community site for more info or click here for a direct link to the press release.

Meanwhile, here is the Introducing Pachube presentation given by Pachube founder, Usman Haque, at the event:

Back to blogging!

We were recently chastised by the wonderful ReadWriteWeb for not updating the blog regularly enough... Good point! Fact is we have been busy with some major behind the scenes changes - but we have been doing tinkering on the front end too.

First, we're happy to announce today that Porthole, powered by Pachube, is ready for its first release! Porthole is an augmented reality (AR) application that provides a view into the data environments hosted by Pachube. Released initially for Mac OSX, it overlays realtime sensor data on your camera view and enables you to query the current status of sensor environments - to view quickly what types of sensor datastreams are present (e.g. light, humidity, electricity, air quality, etc.); what their current values are in relation to historical maxima and minima; how much they have varied over the last 24 hours; and graph the values of each datastream in 15 minute intervals over the last 24 hours.

Video documentation above, but get it for yourself over here: http://apps.pachube.com/porthole/ - and let us know how you get on!

Why is this useful? Well an AR app for Pachube means you don't need to put displays on your sensor systems; your sensor, which authenticates securely with Pachube and your camera/client/device, which authenticates securely with Pachube don't need to authenticate with each other; and, once we introduce granular access controls, it means you can serve different types of data (resolution, intervals) to different people. Just some thoughts - we'll be building on this significantly over the next few months.

Display @ the Design Museum, London, for 'Designs of the Year' exhibition

Pachube is not easy to explain to a lay-audience, especially in a museum context, but we're really happy with the display created for us by Joao Wilbert, who will soon be turning his sights on the design of Pachube.com itself. Read more about Pachube @ the Design Museum here.

The video below documents the display system we use to tell the story: that Pachube is a webservice that enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. We tried to show how Pachube helps melt the boundaries between physical and virtual, with physical sensors in the museum display both connecting to each other and to environments connected already to Pachube; in effect to use Pachube to "plug" anything into anything else!

Open call: funding available for environmental health project using Pachube.com

Funding, in the amount of $5000 is available for a Pachube-powered environmental health project to be featured at the Zero1 2010 SJ Biennal:

Calling all environmental designers, artists and researchers: we're delighted to announce that Pachube.com in collaboration with xClinic, the Environmental Health Clinic + Lab at NYU and ZER01: the Art and Technology Network, are soliciting proposals to create environmental health projects and lifestyle experiments that make use of Pachube.

One project will be selected for funding in the amount of $5000 and will be featured as part of the Out of the Garage, Into the World program at the 2010 01SJ Biennial.....

.... For more information and to apply, see here: http://zero1.org/01sj/out-of-the-garage/pachube and you can download the full version of the xClinic/Pachube call in PDF format here.

Read more about the xClinic + Pachube + zero1 call here and good luck to all!

Data Logger source code available under a GPL

Happy to say that we've finally released the Data Logger source code under a GPL so that you can start building your own Pachube-powered iPhone apps!

We released Data Logger, the iPhone app, last month as an example of an application that uses the Pachube backend to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a timestamp and geolocation. It has been used for all sorts of things (529 feeds as of this writing) - not many of them terribly interesting, but that was to be expected. We released it basically to show what's possible at a technical level, without defining too carefully the bounds of use for the app.

The real intention was to create reliable source code that we could release to the community so that you, the community can start to do interesting things with it... build your own iPhone apps that make use of Pachube in ways that none of us can predict!

So now you can grab the Data Logger source code, available under a GPL from GitHub here:http://github.com/cburman/Data-Logger-for-iPhone and start to create your own Pachube-powered iPhone apps!

More info about the announcement here: http://community.pachube.com/node/370 and find the source code here: http://github.com/cburman/Data-Logger-for-iPhone

System update, January 15, 2010

Just posted at the community site, we'll be making some updates to the system later today. There will hopefully be no significant downtime and we'll have an exciting new feature which we know you're going to like!

Data Logger: official Pachube iPhone app finally available

After a lot of coding, testing, tweaking and retesting by Chris followed by several rejections for, uh..., minor 'errors' we're happy to say Data Logger, the official Pachube iPhone app is finally available in the App Store!

Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a timestamp and geolocation. You might use Data Logger to store electricity meter readings, to create maps of pollution or temperature sensor readings around your neighbourhood, or animal sightings around the city.You can also set up custom data feeds, with user-defined min and max values, tags, description and units.

Stay tuned for more Pachube apps to come, including a mapping app that will chart your data at the geolocation it was recorded at...

Maintenance Notice

Hi there, Pachube.com will be unavailable for approx 30 mins at 02:00 GMT on Monday 4th January 2010.

This is because we are migrating our database system to some new hardware.

The community site, and this blog will be unaffected by the maintenance, and you can also follow us on Twitter for updates.

• Community Site: community.pachube.com
• Blog: blog.pachube.com
• Twitter: @pachube, @pachube_dev

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.