Getting Started with ThingSpeak | IoT from Data to Action, Part 1

The Internet of Things, often called IoT, gives increased access to and control of certain smart devices, like a nest thermostat, ring doorbell, or Philips Hues lights. Sensors on these smart devices measure certain types of data. And the power of IoT can transfer that data to the Cloud, where it can be used to make decisions anywhere and any time.

You don't need to be an expert Cloud engineer to collect, analyze, and act on your data. ThingSpeak is one of the easiest ways to get into IoT. Since it includes MATLAB, you can quickly analyze and visualize data. With ThingSpeak, you can remotely control your devices and schedule your code to run automatically.

I'm Ron. And together with CJ, we will guide you through the basics of ThingSpeak and then show a few advanced features, so that you will be able to make the best use of IoT with ThingSpeak.

The IoT workflow with ThingSpeak includes interfaces for your devices to collect data, the ability to view and analyze the data or create custom visualizations.

And ways to act on the data, like sending email alerts, tweets, or queuing commands to send back to the device. For this demonstration, we'll be using ThingSpeak to study environmental data.

Let's get started by setting up our ThingSpeak account. To do so, go to ThingSpeak.com and click "Get Started For Free."

You need a MathWorks account if you don't already have one. If you need to create one, simply click on Create One. Fill in the required information and you're now good to go.

ThingSpeak uses channels to store data from a single device or a single location, such as data scraped from the web. First, navigate to your channel's page. Answer the pop up box about your intended use. And now.

Let's create a new channel for our environmental study.

Our channel will be called Environmental Monitor, with the description "math classroom air quality."

A channel can have up to eight fields, each holding data from a different sensor attached to one device. Our environmental monitor records temperature in field one, humidity in field two, pressure in field three, and so on. We need to explicitly enable every field we plan to use. In our case, we'll be using all the eight fields.

If you end up having a lot of channels, you can create custom tags to group together similar channels. We'll tag this channel, "air quality." You can also set the Home location, latitude and longitude of your channel.

If you use GitHub to store your ThingSpeak code for our channel, you can add a link here or include a video for your channel. Now that our channel is set up, we are ready to start collecting data from our things.

Here is what your channel can look like once you have it all set up. You can see live updates and a variety of custom visualizations, like gauges and interesting plots.

You can watch the next video to see how you can send data from your devices to ThingSpeak. Click on the links below to watch these videos.