Note: I don’t do this any more. Third party APIs are a world of hurt – you save some time up front and end up chasing someone else’s upgrade path on their agenda, supporting their ads. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with building cloud services and dependencies into your work, as long as you don’t want it to be up there for more than six weeks in my experience.
In their increasing commercialisation as Pachube went away from the original hacker ethos to Cosm, and now Xively, Xively have totally borked the documentation, at least for freebie cheapskates.
The most obvious thing you want to do with an IoT device is to chart the time series. With Pachube and Cosm that was easy. It’s also pretty easy using Xively, but what isn’t easy is finding out how to do it!
This is what I’m after. I have a Geiger counter, and a PIC ticks up a counter each time it detects an event. After a minute is up, it reads the counter, sends it via LLAP over a serial RF network to a Raspberry Pi that uploads the count to Cosm Xively and resets the counter, and it all starts over again.
Note: I’ve now moved to running RRDtool on the Pi because I found Xively just a little bit too intermittent, plus there’s the whole getting control of my own data thing. I found it more reliable to store the data locally, generate the graph and then upload the graph. It isn’t necessarily Xively’s fault – I get the feeling my ADSL connection just isn’t reliable enough for something that needs to update every minute,
RRDtool looks a bit more grungy, though I kinda like that here –
Anyway, back to Xively, and how easy graphing from Xively worked for me –
It was easy to find out how to do it on Pachube and Cosm but because Xively is all about provisioning IoT bits rather than hackers’ web charting now it’s the devil’s own job to find out how to do it. Xively favour stackexchange for support nowadays, but they can be less than helpful to n00bs or those who do not show that they feel The Force to the required extent 😉
Here is what I did to embed a Xively chart:
Read this from Xively on how to embed a chart – it’s not linked from any obvious place.
https://xively.com/dev/docs/api/data/read/single_datastream/
It so happens that the png chart option is a specific instance of reading a single datastream. You, me, and everybody else asks Google ‘how do I embed a Xively chart image’. Xively think of this in terms of ‘how do I display as single datastream’ and they’d rather you not do that, but parse the data returned from the feed, so they hide the relevant page in a backwater of their documentation because they don’t see it as important. Which is entirely their right – after all, you get the support you pay for!
Then import the image like so
https://api.xively.com/v2/feeds/YOUR_FEED_ID_HERE/datastreams/YOUR_CHANNEL_NAME_HERE.png?width=730&height=250&colour=F15A24&timezone=UTC
obviously fiddle with width height, colour to taste. Note that it doesn’t need you API KEY, because presumably a PNG isn’t about to start posting data back to your feed any time soon. One of the more useful extra items is the duration=3hours
which doesn’t happen to be one of the official parameters in the Xively historical parameters documentation, but it is in the example they give and is a useful undocumented feature. A shorter duration works better with the Geiger count.
Your device needs to be public access if you want other people to see it, natch 😉 Make it private and they will be invited to log in on Xively, which sort of defeats the point.
Now why did that have to be so hard?
Alternatives ways of showing Xively data
The embedded Xively chart is loaded when you load your page, it doesn’t auto-refresh like the display on your Xively Workbench. That’s fine for many things, but it is very Web 1.0 so if you want more then take a look at Dave’s method of using Google charts by getting the raw data back from Xively. That way you get a more responsive chart and can plot more than one thing at a time, but you are looking at a lot more work compared to the quick-and-dirty method of an embedded image.