Arduino and MBED can act as clients to web services like Pachube giving them an online presence but making reliable connections over the internet is easier said than done. This article deals with some of the issues involved in communicating with remote services and how to overcome them, by building a simple Arduino climate logging client that can be accessed via a browser or mobile handset using Pachube.
Pachube provides services for logging, sharing and displaying sensor data of all kinds using an HTTP based API which is easy to implement with Arduino. A free account supports upto 10 sensor feeds updated in near real time and the data is stored for upto 3 months. Interactive graphs provided by the service can be embedded on your mobile giving you access to your data anywhere. You can even use other peoples data feeds as inputs to your own applications.
Here's a screenshot of my feeds
The good thing about Open Source Hardware is there is plenty of sample code available that can help you get a project up and running quickly. The down side is that some of it is not very robust, especially given the problems of communicating over the internet. So my initial attempts using code published online let me connect and send data samples but ev… Read more
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