It’s a hot, hot summer

Summer holidays in Australia and it has been a real scorcher of a week. As I need to get some preparation for the school year happening I am still playing with IoT here, even if it’s a little bit harder working away from home.

I’ve been playing with NodeMCU a bit more, because it has the obvious benefit of built-in WiFi, so once configured it just needs power and a network connection and you have data logging.

As noted in my previous post, Xively is no longer providing free hosting, so I need to find other options. A bit of hacking and some examples online and I have temperature logging being pushed to ThingSpeak. I’ve put the board outside plugged into a USB phone charger and am using a phone hotspot to provide internet connectivity. Proof-of-concept done!

Feed is here: https://thingspeak.com/channels/407022

graph of temperature
Local temperature

Currently it’s dropped a little to just 35 °C, cooling off a bit!

Edit: Now back at home, and it is inside so a bit cooler!

Home weather offline for the moment

With a bit of ingenuity and a lot of trial and error there are ways of making this IoT work without having to sign up for commercial services. Since I am doing this for hobbyist/education purposes I can’t really justify paying for business services.

So what tends to happen is, something that one uses for a while and ‘it just works’ stops working because the provider changes the terms of use. Before Christmas, Xively sent out a notice that they were dropping their free data hosting, and I would either need to upgrade to a paid service or go elsewhere. This is quite reasonable, they are a business and I have been able to use their services for several years now. They even made a few suggestions for alternative hosts.

Being the silly season, time was limited to get a new service onboard, although I did spend some time with ThingSpeak it didn’t go smoothly, so I would have to say that Xively do have a very good platform because it was so easy to get up and running in the first place. So at the moment the weather station isn’t logging to the web, and will need some more work done before it does.

The Xively feed started on Mar 14, 2014, so it has been logging data for almost four years. That was my first real IoT experiment so I’m pleased with that! It was interesting to be able to check the weather at home when we were on holidays, and you could even work out who had been working in the study by the changing light levels.