Introduction:
Internet of Things (IoT) analytics consists of three major components:
- Sensor gathering and sending data to Internet
- Server receiving and storing data
- Software visualizing and analyzing data
In this post we introduce one free (Hooray!) server for #2 above: Phant. Phant is an easy-to-use data logger created by electronics shop Sparkfun.
Phant’s logo. The elephant represents a perfect data logger’s ability to never forget.
How to Use Phant?
A versatile data logger, on Phant we can create many “streams” to listen for data coming from individual sensors. In a stream we define things like:
- A title representing this data stream.
- Description.
- “Fields” as different elements of data in the data stream. For example “humidity”, “temperature”,”wind speed” for a weather station data stream.
- Other properties of this data stream (location, tags, etc).
Once a stream is created you get three keys (a key is a long set of random characters like “7U$equbREBaVa2Eq” ) to connect and manage this stream:
- Public key: for identifying this stream in Phant’s API.
- Private key: used in Phant’s API to ensure only you can upload data to this stream. Should be kept in secret.
- Delete key: used to delete your stream. Should be kept in secret.
Uploading data to Phant:
To upload data, use Phant’s API as described in the documentation. with your own public/private key For example:
http://data.sparkfun.com/input/PUBLIC_KEY?private_key=PRIVATE_KEY&temp=91.4&humidity=86%25
Get Phant:
You can use Phant directly from Sparkfun’s server, but you are limited to 100 data uploads in 15 minutes (one upload per 9 seconds).
You can also download Phant’s source code, modify it (like lifting the upload limitation), and install on your server. To do so you need to know Javascript and Node.Js. I have my own version that increases the limitation and enforces signin. You can get my version on Github (use with your own risk!) or take a look on data.modernblackhand.com.