IoT Data Logger: Phant

Introduction:

Internet of Things (IoT) analytics consists of three major components:

1. Sensor gathering and sending data to Internet
2. Server receiving and storing data
3. 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:

1. Public key: for identifying this stream in Phant’s API.
2. Private key: used in Phant’s API to ensure only you can upload data to this stream. Should be kept in secret.
3. 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.