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.

Wanted: Pachube+Arduino super users to help out in the forums!

Just posted this in the community forum: http://community.pachube.com/node/317 – any takers, please reply over there!

It's great that we're getting a lot more Arduino users signing up to Pachube and making use of the data brokering services that it offers; but we're also noticing that there is a much greater requirement for support of issues that Arduino users face.

The issues that Arduino users encounter, and that are posted about here in the Pachube forums, are very often simple Arduino/Ethernet/Processing issues, rather than Pachube issues. We don't want to have to uncharitably send people on their way, to the Arduino or Processing or Ladyada forums, but on the other hand we're starting to spend more time on answering basic questions than we're able to, which detracts from general Pachube support and development.

Do any of you Arduino+Pachube gurus have suggestions on what we should do about this? Any chance you could help out people here in the forum or, probably since you know the Arduino community better, direct them to the appropriate Arduino resources? Do we need a FAQ? Is there a good one to point users to in the first place? Or can we start building one communally?

Suggestions and comments greatly appreciated!

Council: a thinktank, consultancy, accelarator and forecasting group for the Internet of Things

We're going to be at Council's launch in Brussels on December 4, 2009 – how about you?

Council is a loose group of professionals with different ideas and opinions. We sometimes differ and will probably clash. We prefer to host the full range of opinions on what will be a small avalanche of disruptive innovations. We do have something in common though. We have been through the full range of emotions and conceptual breakdown that comes with grasping the territory, the full logistical, business, social and philosophical implications of the Internet of Things.

Co-hosted by LIFT, Tinker.it and Council, there's a stellar list of participants, presentations, workshops and conversations, all centered around this notion of "the internet of things".

(Note: Pachube CEO Usman Haque is one of the founding members of Council).

Using Pachube realtime data in client-side applications

We'll be expanding Pachube's search and query capabilities in the future, but they're already one of the most powerful aspects of the Pachube platform.

As an example, here's screen capture from a Pachube app we're building that provides a realtime snapshot of the planet's energy consumption -- at least according to the Pachube userbase!

The entire viewer is built in javascript, using the Google Earth API - so in theory anyone could build this type of application for their own website: it doesn't require any special functionality from Pachube's backend. We're simply doing the following:

1. Creating the Google Earth instance
2. Searching Pachube for any feeds that contain 'current|cost|cc128|energy|electricity|watt|power' (i.e. an OR operation) using http://www.pachube.com/api/search.json
3. Extracting realtime data from any datastreams within that search result that contain the tag "watts".
4. Creating 3d bars on the Google Earth instance at the geolocation of each result for the current watts values of the relevant datastreams

The app still needs some configuration work, which is why it's not quite ready for public release as an official Pachube app, but we're releasing this screencapture to give an idea of the kinds of things that anyone could be building on top of the Pachube platform.

Triggers bring 'push' capabilities to Pachube

The introduction of triggers to Pachube's suite of features is a major update that takes it to a whole new level. Read more about more about how and why to use them here: http://community.pachube.com/node/289

Also known as webhooks ("User-defined HTTP callbacks for push, pipes and plugins") and notifications, we're calling them triggers because we want to make clear that they enable Pachube datastreams actually to plug into and provoke (i.e. trigger) remote actuators, devices, scripts, buildings, etc. Skip here for a short tutorial on using triggers or read on for why you should be using them!

Up until now, Pachube has largely been a "pull" service: you've been able to send data to us as and when you want (i.e. "push" to us) or have us request data from you as necessary (i.e. we "pull" from you), but in order to get data out of Pachube you had to repeatedly poll (i.e. you could only "pull" from) Pachube to discover datastream changes. With the introduction of triggers, Pachube is now just as good at receiving (and storing) data as it is at acting upon (and sending out) data to remote devices, actuators and buildings: just what a "patchbay" should be!

With triggers, you set up conditions on datastreams (on anyone's datastreams, not just your own), and when those conditions have been satisfied (e.g. change of value, value is greater than threshold,value equals etc.) Pachube will push (by HTTP POST) a notification to the URL of your choice. This might be a php script that sends an email; or that posts to twitter; or connects to an SMS gateway to send a message to your mobile phone; or it might be a microcontroller that is able to act on the HTTP POST to actuate some physical device (like a lightswitch, a garage door, a window louvre, etc.).

You can add triggers to anyone's datastreams (not just your own), to build alarm systems, notifications, decision systems, etc. This gets closer than ever towards our vision of patching the planet and being able to plug anything into anything else!

Read on here for details: http://community.pachube.com/node/289

Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Internet of Things

There's another great article on ReadWriteWeb about the Internet of Things, which talks about "a small UK startup which has impressed us a lot this year: Pachube."

we'll see how companies as big as IBM and as small as Pachube are building up this new world of Internet data and services.

It's always nice to be spoken of in the same breath as stalwarts like IBM! Thanks @rww!

Pachube design update

Pachube.com has had a bit of a design upgrade! As described in the Pachube.community announce:

... we've just deployed some design changes (a) to make the site more useful/understandable/navigable and (b) to prepare for some major features that will be rolled out in the next few weeks. Stay tuned...!

Changes include the global map (which now shows terrain and markers classified as agriculture, building, device, energy, environment, transport, or other); a Terms of Use (finally!), which we hope is short and fair enough; and all Pachube graphs are now able to indicate when data was frozen for a period using dashed lines like this one (if it continues to have frozen moments!):

And as we said: there are a number of other hidden features already deployed that we're really excited about because they are going to push Pachube into a whole new league -- but more about that soon!

PachubeMon: new iPhone app released in the wild!

We're delighted to announce that Pachube user musicalgeometry (aka Jason Job) has just released a free iPhone app, PachubeMon, that enables you to keep track of all your favourite Pachube feeds.

PachubeMon is a utility app for the iPhone that lets you manage and view your Pachube feeds all in one place. The main page allows you to add and remove feeds. By selecting a feed from the list you can view it. You can find feed IDs on the Pachube website here.

Click here for a direct link to PachubeMon in the iTunes store.

Thanks Jason!