Temboo

Temboo Create, Make, Code the Internet of Everything

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Smart Networked Trash Cans with Temboo and ARTIK

Temboo Smart Trash Cans are a great way for developers to start getting involved and thinking about how the development and advantages of smart cities can be. At Samsung’s latest presentation at the CES and Mobile World Congress, they’ve brought to light how this can be taken even further using MQTT to network the smart trash cans and make them even smarter. With Temboo coming pre-installed in every Artik board, creating industrial and production-ready solutions like this are increasingly easier to develop.

To find out more, you can read the original post at Artik blog post

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How to choose a temperature sensor for IoT

Choosing a temperature sensor for connected hardware applications may seem like a straightforward decision. Everyone has experience monitoring the temperature using their own sense of hot & cold, analog thermometers, and the many digital temperature displays on thermostats, car dashboards, and smart phones. But selecting the right temperature sensor for Internet of Things applications involves taking many factors into account and is not a simple decision.

For example, our customers here at Temboo build and run IoT applications for aviation, agriculture, manufacturing, research labs, and many other industries. They’re measuring the temperature of very different things in very different settings with very different needs. Choosing the right temperature sensor in each case requires taking into account the scale, location, budget, and intended use of your IoT application.

“I generally dive into looking for sensors with Octopart; then I look at Digikey, Texas Instruments, and Mouser; and other suppliers to find out what exists and compare them. You really want to make sure you’ve got all the information you need.” - Claire Mitchell, Temboo Product Team

Deciding on an IoT Temperature Sensor

With Temboo, the choices for hardware are near limitless. Our software libraries come pre-installed on hardware platforms from Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Arduino, and our downloadable SDKs work on many devices. And since most sensors only require a few GPIO pins to connect a hardware board, the available choices are almost endless.

Today, we’ll cover temperature sensors in general and the rationale for our choice of temperature sensor used in our Connected Sensors IoT Application. In general, it’s important to keep in mind a few key factors when picking sensors:

Cost: How much will it cost? Are the costs scalable if I use this component? This is important to consider so that the solution remains truly cost effective.

Supplier: Where can I get it? How trustworthy is this seller? Make sure the supplier has reviews from other buyers that indicate on-time shipments and quality merchandise.

Accuracy & Precision: How reliable are the measurements? How accurate and precise do you need your measurements to be? Monitoring biological stock on an industrial farm will require more accurate temperature sensors than monitoring the conditions in a living room.

Accessibility: Can I get it for my planned project? What is the scale of the project? Certain components can only be bought or ordered only when the demanded size is in the millions, it’s important to know if the minimum batch size is compatible with your industrial needs.

Measurement Range: What ranges will it work for? It would be foolhardy to get a temperature sensor that only works above 40°C to monitor freezers - make sure that the range is applicable to what you want to use it for.

Power Consumption: Will it work with the power source I have? Make sure the power the sensor consumes is compatible with the system; it would be disastrous if the circuit has too much current and blows out the sensors.

IoT Temperature Sensors We Looked At

Texas Instruments' LMT84LP, the sensor that we chose for our cloud-connected sensors. It’s got great precision at a very competitive price with industrial-grade quantities:

Cost: Scaling down from $0.91

Supplier: Mouser Electronics

Accessibility: Available in various industrial quantities, but also smaller batches

Accuracy & Precision: +/- 0.4°C

Measurement Range: -50°C - 150°C

Min~Max Voltage: 1.5V - 5.5V

Texas Instruments' LM35DZ, although used commonly amongst the DIY community, it is not something that would be able to fulfill our needs for a sensor suitable in industrial usage due to its precision range and costs per unit:

Cost: Scaling down from $1.86

Supplier: DigiKey

Accessibility: Available in various industrial quantities, but also smaller batches

Accuracy & Precision: +/- 1.5°C

Measurement Range: 0°C - 100°C

Power consumption: 4V - 30V

Sparkfun’s DS18B20, wired probe sensor. With a heftier price tag, it wasn’t suitable for our intended usage on industrial farms but might be interesting for those working in more extreme environments:

Cost: Scaling down form $9.95

Supplier: SparkFun

Accessibility: Available in various industrial quantities, but also smaller batches

Accuracy & Precision: +/- 0.5°C

Measurement Range: -55°C - 125°C

Power Consumption: 3.0 - 5.5V

Atmel’s AT30TSE754A-SS8M-T, with a price point much more enticing than our pick for the cloud-connected sensors, we passed over this choice only because of the less precise nature of the instrument:

Cost: Scaling down from $0.53

Supplier: DigiKey

Accessibility: Only available in quantities at or above 4,000

Accuracy & Precision: +/- 1 - 3°C

Measurement Range: -55°C - 125°C

Power consumption: 1.7V - 5.5V

For our Connected Sensors IoT App, the intended use case is monitoring the temperature of delicate assets such as biological stock that can go from good to bad in the span of 0.5°C. To enable a mass-produced and production-ready sensor solution, our main considerations were cost and accuracy. The Texas Instruments’ LMT84LP thus fit our needs because of its relatively high accuracy and low per unit cost. Had we been monitoring machines, we could potentially have gone with a less accurate temperature sensor, as the difference between a degree point or two for an industrial machine would still result in the same automated system shutdown or cooling procedure.

“You’ll not only want to find the sensor that meets your application’s requirements for range and accuracy, but is also easily accessible in the right quantities for your devices.” - Kevin Buck, Temboo Engineering

However, priorities may shift for developers who are looking for temperature sensors that work under special conditions (such as the DS18B20 for underwater projects) or require sensors that work under different power consumption levels. For cases where the deployment is on a larger scale or requires a higher-touch of customization, it may be best to approach a sensor manufacturer directly to request sensors that would fit the solution’s needs. There are many sensor manufacturers out there--this exhibitor list from the upcoming Sensors Expo & Conference  is a good resource to start investigating them.  

Why Choosing a Temperature Sensor Matters

40% of the food produced in the United States is wasted, in many cases not even making it to your table through the distribution chain. Recently vaccines worth $1.3M spoiled in Pakistan, imperiling the health of many. Aviation firms spend millions of dollar each year complying with audit requirements to ensure their equipment is safe. These are just a few industry examples where better temperature monitoring will significantly reduce costs while also bringing big benefits to health, safety, and the environment. The Internet of Things enables companies to improve their bottom lines while making the world a better place.

Our Connected Sensors IoT App can serve as an off-the-shelf temperature sensing solution for your business, and since Temboo automatically generates the application code for the device you’re using, you can modify and extend the IoT application so that it becomes a custom solution for your own business’s needs. Start building your own temperature sensing IoT application today.

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Cool IoT Applications from Our Amazing Users

With Presidents’ Day coming up, you might be looking for something fun to do over the long weekend.  Why not try building your own version of one of these cool IoT applications?

The Internet of Things is extremely interesting, but can sometimes seem daunting for beginners. Matthew Hallberg comes to the rescue with his introductory tutorial on weather checking using an Arduino Yún: http://bit.ly/1nRVmon

People who say that it’s boring to watch grass grow must have never tried it with cacti and a time-lapse camera. Ghanashyam creates a super cool budget time-lapse camera just with a webcam, Temboo, and Dropbox: http://bit.ly/1TGX1ZF

First went the cable boxes, and now goes TV. But how do you get the weather without watching the weather channel? You could go the boring route and check a weather website… or you could create your own easy-to-make personal weather station with this tutorial: http://bit.ly/1QSuH3X

There are many other tutorials and cool IoT applications out there as well, which you can check out on https://www.instructables.com/ and https://www.hackster.io/. It's really been overwhelming how creative our users are, and we're working to make sure that you can be more creative than ever!

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Fitbit OAuth Update

Fitbit is updating how developers access its API to improve security. We’re reaching out to our customers to ensure seamless functioning of their Temboo-powered applications that access the Fitbit API. 

Fitbit has begun transitioning their security model from OAuth 1.0a to OAuth 2.0, and developers should transition their Fitbit apps to OAuth 2.0 by March 14, 2016.

Since Fitbit's introduction of OAuth 2.0, our Fitbit Choreos have included support for both OAuth versions. Until this week OAuth 2.0 inputs had appeared as "optional" inputs for our Choreos on our website. 

We’ve now removed the OAuth 1.0a inputs (ConsumerKey, ConsumerSecret, AccessTokenSecret) from our Fitbit Choreo pages, but they will continue to work in Temboo SDKs until you switch to OAuth 2.0.

We strongly recommend that you upgrade your application’s code to use OAuth 2.0 by March 14, 2016. On that day Fitbit will perform a one hour blackout test. During the test, all OAuth 1.0a requests will receive an error. By updating your app to follow the OAuth 2.0 flow by March 14th, you can use the blackout test to verify that your code is running as expected.

Note that Fitbit will permanently remove OAuth 1.0a support from their API on April 12, 2016. You can find detailed instructions for updating your Fitbit OAuth code via Temboo here.

As always, if you have any questions about this update, please don't hesitate to get in touch. We will be happy to help!

Summary 

What is happening?  Fitbit are discontinuing support for OAuth 1.0a, and moving to OAuth 2.0 only.

When?  The hard deadline is April 12, 2016, with a blackout test on March 14, 2016.

How can I update my code?  Check out our instructions for how use Temboo's support for Fitbit OAuth 2.0. 

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Smart Sensors for IoT Data

There are all sorts of useful applications for sensors that can connect to the cloud, from logging data to sending alerts to disseminating information. We built a connected sensor Internet of Things application that logs temperature data and sends email alerts to specified individuals when the temperature falls outside an expected range. This video explains how it works: 

Although we chose to use a temperature sensor here, any type of sensor could be used in a connected application like this one. We wired our temperature sensor to a Samsung ARTIK 10, which we programmed to email us whenever the temperature that the sensor was reading got too hot or too cold. We also created a simple PHP web app to let us update the temperature thresholds that we were using for our alerts. Check out the instructions on our website to build a connected sensor app of your own!

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Cheers to You, and to an Innovative New Year!

You inspired us in 2015! This past year, we talked with many of our users about their amazing Temboo applications (like an energy monitoring system for Formula One and data loggers for museum exhibits), created some cool applications of our own, built some new partnerships, and released some great IoT features. We reviewed the highlights here—Happy New Year!

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New Arduino Smart Trash Can Instructable

Are you looking for a fun IoT idea to tackle during the holidays? How about building yourself a smart trash can? More efficient waste disposal is an important benefit that the Internet of Things can offer to population centers, as it will keep cities cleaner while also helping them to cut costs, but you don’t need to be operating on an urban scale to realize some of the benefits for yourself as well.

This new Instructable walks you through how to build a smart trash can application using Temboo and an Arduino Yún. You’ll program the Arduino to send you alerts via Zendesk when the can is full, and to log data in a Google Calendar about when the trash is emptied. It’s also easy to mix and match hardware and web services if you want your IoT trash can to work differently--perhaps you want it to send you email alerts, or even Tweet when it’s full! Try it out, and make your trash smarter!

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Build an IoT Aquaponics System

Do you have a green thumb (or do you wish that you did)? You may have heard of aquaponic gardening, a way to efficiently grow plants in limited space. Rik Kretzinger, an aquaponics enthusiast with experience in building commercial greenhouses, transformed his yard into a small farm with a complex of aquaponic growing beds that provide a ready source of fresh produce for him and his family. He used Temboo to add an IoT twist to his growing process: an Arduino Yún that Rik wired to his valves lets him remotely monitor factors such as humidity and temperature, and manage watering cycles from his phone. If you're interested in trying out aquaponic gardening for yourself, you're in luck—Rik has created a number of resources for budding farmers, including an Instructable to guide you through every step of building and running your own connected growing bed. You can also read about his cool IoT application in Make Magazine.

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Why M2M: A Behind-the Scenes Look at What We Were Thinking

Two weeks ago, we introduced a set of Temboo tools for programming machine-to-machine networks. Today, we wanted to take a bit of a deeper look at what exactly we did, and why we decided to do it.

So what does M2M do, and how does it do it?

M2M networks are great for situations in which distributed devices need to communicate with one another—for example, in a manufacturing facility where multiple machines are working together on different parts of a product. M2M protocols allow the devices in the network to gather and transmit data from sensors or to act on their environment without having to maintain an Internet connection, even if some Internet connectivity is necessary for processing data or issuing commands. A gateway-edge model, in which distributed edge devices communicate with a gateway device using an M2M protocol and the gateway device communicates with cloud services using the Internet, enables a low power local network to interact with the Internet.

There are quite a few different protocols out there for enabling M2M communication. We chose three: MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP. In general, we make an effort to remain hardware, software, and protocol agnostic so that people who use Temboo have as much choice as possible in what they build, and it was important to us that we support more than one M2M protocol. Of the protocols that we considered, these three seemed to be the most promising; the technology surrounding the Internet of Things is evolving rapidly, so there’s a good chance that it won’t be long before more protocols join that group.

Specifically, we liked MQTT and CoAP because they are excellent for lightweight devices that have constrained memory and that consume little power, which are exactly the sorts of devices that will connect distributed sensors and objects to the Internet and make them smarter as the Internet of Things matures. We included HTTP due to memory considerations as well; an HTTP gateway will allow for HTTPS connections to devices that normally would not have enough memory to implement them.

Pick a protocol

The different protocols are useful for different situations, and any decisions regarding which one to use should be informed by what it is that you are trying to do. MQTT uses a publisher-subscriber communication model, allowing clients to send commands to many other devices with one message (or, conversely, enabling one device to “listen” for commands from many different devices). This might come in handy on an assembly line, for instance, where it would be important for a machine that is experiencing a problem to inform machines upstream that they should pause until the issue is resolved.

CoAP, in contrast, uses a client-server model, which enables two-way communication: clients can send requests to servers, and also receive responses and commands from servers. A network of devices communicating using CoAP would be ideal in a scenario requiring both monitoring and control, such as an energy usage management system in a multi-unit commercial building. Data on energy consumption could be sent by edge devices to a gateway, which would then use the data to determine where lights, heating, or air conditioning should be on or off.

Finally, HTTP is useful for situations in which secure communication is required, but the devices involved do not have the memory needed to support encryption. A local HTTP gateway can forward messages securely using HTTPS.

M2M + Temboo = the best of both worlds

Temboo’s M2M support is designed to marry the low power and low memory benefits of M2M networks with the processing power and flexibility of the Internet. For systems involving many devices spread over a wide area, an M2M model is often the most practical option available; connecting each device to the Internet can become prohibitively difficult and expensive as the network grows. However, an Internet connection is often the best way for devices to communicate with the world outside of their local network, and for many applications, the ability to send information to or receive commands from a remote agent, whether human or digital, is crucial.

Temboo M2M allows people who are using a network of connected sensors or machines to achieve the benefits of low power devices without sacrificing the benefits of Internet connectivity. It also brings M2M into our IoT software stack, making it much easier to integrate features such as data streaming and remote reprogramming into multi-device applications using automatically generated Temboo code.

What’s next?

As M2M networks become more common, we expect a wide variety of industries to discover and correct new points of inefficiency in their business or production models—not only will the M2M networks themselves make communication between different parts of complex systems faster and cheaper, they will also make it easier to monitor different parts of those systems so that better decisions can be made. The proliferation of M2M networks will also create new opportunities for developing more sophisticated maintenance capabilities: network managers will need ways to efficiently modify and update the devices that they oversee so that they can effectively adapt to changing circumstances.

The maturation of M2M technology is an exciting development that is going to play a large role in driving the Internet of Things forward in the next several years. If you’re interested in learning even more about it, there are some links to further reading below, and you can try out Temboo’s M2M programming tools by signing up for a free account here.

Further Reading:

Useful article about IoT protocols from the Eclipse Foundation

MQTT homepage

RFC 2752, which describes the CoAP protocol

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IoTurkey Dinner

Do you want to put an IoT spin on Thanksgiving dinner? Trey German, the resident hardware hacker at Texas Instruments, did. He built an awesome sous vide turkey cooker using Temboo’s Twilio Choreos and a TI MSP430 LaunchPad: the LaunchPad controls the temperature in the cooker, and can itself be controlled remotely via SMS. As the turkey cooks, the LaunchPad sends Trey SMS updates on its progress, allowing him to respond to adjust the cooking time or temperature. This IoT application is a great way to kill (cook?) two birds with one stone: it will let you prepare a perfect turkey dinner, and give you more time to spend with family and friends on the holiday. You can find out how to build your own here.

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Machine-to-Machine to the Cloud

Now you can program scalable, flexible, and production-ready distributed device applications in minutes with Temboo’s new support for M2M networks! From monitoring air quality and noise levels in urban environments to tracking cross-country shipments to controlling water usage in agricultural settings, you can use networked sensors and devices in all sorts of powerful IoT applications.

Connect your networked Samsung ARTIK, Texas Instruments, and Arduino hardware to any web service, and choose to have your gateway communicate with your edge devices using MQTT, CoAP, or HTTP. Check out this video to see it all in action!

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Make Waste Management Smarter

Making waste disposal more efficient can cut costs for cities while also keeping them cleaner overall. We built an Internet of Things application that makes it easy to monitor waste levels in trash bins. In this video, we show you how to build a smart trash app that monitors how full a trash can is and lets you know when it needs to be emptied.

We connected an IR distance sensor to a Samsung ARTIK 10, and attached the sensor to the lid of a trash can. Then, we programmed the ARTIK to send an alert to the sanitation department using Zendesk if the volume of trash in the can reaches a certain threshold. When the can is emptied, the ARTIK will also create an event in a Google Calendar to log the activity. Check out the instructions on our website to build a smart trash can application of your own!

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Build the Industrial Internet of Things

Trash cans that let you know when they're full, production lines that can be controlled from a mobile app, and buildings that help you calculate how much you’re saving by heating them more efficiently—these are just a few of the powerful new end-to-end IoT Applications that Temboo enables you to build. From picking your hardware to generating your program code, Temboo’s dynamic, step-by-step user interface shows you how to create connected applications that will make your industry smart.

Every Temboo IoT Application includes a helpful demo video, a suggested list of materials, and an illustrated series of step-by-step instructions. Once you’ve finished setting up your application on our website, Temboo automatically generates all the application code you need, customized to fit your specifications and ready for production—you can upload it to your hardware right away, or extend and modify it to customize your application even further. Each application can run on several Temboo-integrated chipsets, from industrial SoCs to maker boards; you can select the Samsung ARTIK, Texas Instruments, or Arduino board that you are using, and we’ll continue to add more supported hardware to that list.

Take a look at our first IoT Applications, and be sure to check back as more are released!

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Deconstructing Communication Systems

Modern communication systems have become so advanced that we rarely pause to consider how they work—conversing with someone hundreds or even thousands of miles away is, for many, now a daily occurrence. For his systems design course at California College of the Arts, Noam Zomerfeld decided to delve deeper into the technological complexities that lie beneath communication systems in an effort to understand and present the ways in which their different elements interact. To do it, he designed and built his own system using Temboo.

As the foundation for his exploration, Noam constructed a rudimentary telegraph using a piece of wood, a nail, two batteries, and a wire. With a classmate, he also designed an alternative to Morse code to use with his device. He then made the system incrementally more complex: first, he added an Arduino that would translate strings of text inputted by users into his telegraph code, and then he brought in Temboo’s Twilio Choreos to enable users to provide their inputs via SMS.

Viewers of his application can text a message to Noam’s Twilio number, and the Arduino attached to his telegraph will check the Twilio message queue every few seconds for new arrivals. When it receives a new message, the device will translate it into Noam’s code, which assigns each letter of the alphabet a unique sequence of between three and nine taps. The telegraph then taps out the encoded message, and whoever receives it can decode and transcribe it based on a key that Noam provides. You can see the telegraph in action in this video:

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Tracking Your Social Media Heartbeat

Have you checked your social media pulse recently? Yeli Arenyeka, a student at New York University, decided to make this possible by building an app that helps people visualize their relationships with social media. Called Life in Digital, it presents users with a snapshot of their social media usage in the form of an electrocardiogram readout.

“Our time on social media is measured in moments, not successive hours. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how much time I spent on Facebook today,” she said. “Being on our phones and using social media networking sites has become so entrenched in our minds that we do not know when and how much we’re doing it.”

Life in Digital uses Temboo’s Processing SDK and Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr Choreos to gather information on an individual’s social media usage, and then displays that information in intervals of a specified length of time. The data points appear as heartbeats on an electrocardiograph, allowing users to see how often and how heavily they engage with social media. You can find the code for the app on Github, and see more of Yeli’s work on her website and on Twitter.

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Ultramarathoning, Round II

You may remember that around this time last year our friend Ande Gregson spent six days running one hundred fifty miles across the Sahara Desert as part of the annual Marathon des Sables race. Well, he did it again this year with a new and improved version of his Marathon des Sables Gadget, the Maraduino. Using an Arduino Yún, Temboo’s Twilio Choreos, and a phone that he carried with him in the desert, he kept his supporters at home abreast of his progress whenever he had phone signal. We’re already looking forward to seeing what next year's edition of the gadget can do!

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Insights into the Future of IoT

What Internet of Things applications do you think will have the greatest impact on the future? Every time we interview someone for our #DeconstructingIoT video series, we make a point of asking that question. This week, we have insights from NYU CUSP’s Steve Koonin, who told us about one application that is already here and another that he would like to see in the future, and from Rudin Management Company’s John Gilbert, who shared an anecdote from turn-of-the-century Vienna to illustrate what he thinks we’ll see next.