Alternatives to Pachube/Cosm

Projects Programming
21

If there is an Arduino "Post of the Year Award", your reply #17 above would have to be a qualifier......

It now appears that my first experience with cosm, late last year, was probably not at the best time. But things appear to be better now, and all the problems I have had of late have been manifestly self-inflicted.

I understand from Klink solar Melbourne that ThingSpeak only handles digital data.

I have had mail from KSDuino as a cosm alternative. I have not actually pursued any of this and am prepared to stick with cosm - for the moment..

22

Thank you. I've had good luck with Cosm for the last few months (both of them) and it looks like they have conquered their problems. I'm not sure what you mean by digital data on thingspeak. I send floating point and integer data to it all the time. If you mean text, they have a status that can be used, but I haven't messed with it yet. Other folks have though. If you need location, I think they have a way to do it, but you'd have to check the documentation to see how.

23

draythomp:
I send floating point and integer data to it all the time.

Ah, I meant integer, and it seems I was wrong anyway!

I will stick with cosm on the remote stations and have a comparative parallel dabble with the others using the home station

24

draythomp:

Could you please explain your web server control of your arduino?

25

Sure, I have a mega2560 that gathers data from around my house and forwards it to Cosm, thingspeak, and emoncms. It also has webserver code to present a page showing what is going on around the house. On that page are a number of buttons that, when clicked, cause some action. Things like turning the pool pump on and off, raising and lowering the temperature in the house, opening or closing the garage doors, that kind of thing. I have a description of it on my blog, but the code is a bit out of date. I recently took on the task of moving all my devices up to Arduino IDE 1.0.3 and haven't gotten around to updating the various source code examples to reflect it.

However, feel free to look around. The specific device that hooks to the internet for information upload to the services and web control of the house is here and the blog where a lot of this is explained is here. Feel free to wander around and grab anything you want.

26

Sorry for opening an old topic, but I thought Id add my experience on here for everyone as I have been using a site not mentioned here yet.
KSduino....
Its a russian site, I think im the only real outside user and I have donated to it, but its a simple one and its pretty much always online, gives simple 24 point graphs, as many as you want and as many datafeeds as you like. The graphing is quite simple and limited but very usefull just the same. I use it for my on grid/off grid solar installation so i can see whats going on anytime anywhere on my phone, and can switch the house on or off the grid whether im home or not. Pretty good value for ten bux:)
Ive since migrated to Xively (the old cosm) and found it already a bit flakey.
I revert back to the KSduino sketch after ive stopped playing around because it just works.
The owner of KSduino has a forum but he is usually not really there much and info is very limited.
But the libraries and instructions are simple and just work. Of course when arduino versions march on and leaves it behind I dont know , so we all have to keep updating our projects dont we, unless we want them to just operate stand alone.

cheers.

27

The owner of KSduino has a forum but he is usually not really there much

Thanks for your comment. I was using xively a month ago and found it bulletproof but all of a sudden nothing worked and I was pretty sure nothing was changed at my end, so it is something of a relief to hear that it can be flakey. The biggest problem with the metamorphosis of cosm was the demise of the forum. That stackoverflow forum is a disaster run by a bunch of pompous and arrogant dopes. I will definitely look at defecting to KSduino, any forum has to be better than StackOverflow, it's just that, when xively is working, it works well.....

28

I'm going to second the previous post about Xively and their support. They removed the forum and went to stackoverflow and they are truly a bunch of arrogant jerks. To add insult to injury, the Xively site has a number of things promised and not delivered scattered around it. The old API works, but you can't move your accumulated data forward to the new facilities. So, if you want to use their new stuff, you get to start over.

Nice going folks. Take a good service and rip it to shreds, then turn your support over to the whims of a bunch of self righteous ....

29

Give GroveStreams.com a look. We're new. We would love to get your thoughts as to whether it would be useful for Arduino folks.

30

mikecmills:
useful for Arduino folks.

Not the slightest bit, it would appear. Grovestreams is a land for the white lab-jacket brigade - and only those of that ilk who achieve immortality by speaking a language known only to themselves.

31

Nick, what do you mean? I took a look at the api and the language examples and it didn't look that bad. Of course, it would be nice to have an arduino example and library, but that shouldn't be too hard to come up with. Sure, the site has some jargon, but they have to do that to impress the marketing types that can't speak any language but their own.

At least I didn't see, "A solutions based implementation" anywhere on the site.

Take a look at the python example, even I could read it, and no one ever accused me of being one of the white coats. Overalls and a dirty t-shirt maybe...

32

Ahhh, good......... I was hoping you would read this.

I found it full of buzz-speak and very unfriendly.

On reflection, I realise that it only takes one arduino user with the ability to cut through all that and the flood-gates may well then open for the rest of us.

33

Unfortunately, buzz speak is something that has totally taken over the technical services sites. In my opinion, that's because they all want to get some money in their hands, so they create a site that does something cool from a technical support aspect. Not like facebook or twitter that caters to teenagers looking to get laid, but to someone that has a technical need and just doesn't want to roll their own. Their hope is not so much that they get customers, as much as some bigger corporation comes along and buys them out. Then the techies that built it take the money and go do something else while the bigger corporation lowers service, raises price, and eventually fails or gets bought out by even bigger corporation.

Of course to do this they have to speak the language of the corporate managers. Which means everything useful is hidden behind a pile of ...

I'm going to try this site, but I'm up to my eyeballs in a different project right now and probably won't get to it for a couple of weeks.

34

Agreed

I had my gear running from here with Xively for a month and then it refused. I'm inclined to think it was them, not me. I am now finally about to establish one of the remote stations up the coast, where it needs to run unattended for about a year. I don't trust Xively so I thought I would give other guys a look, and they were the first.

I'm too old for Python but I will be interested to see if you eventually get some joy out of this. I will probably stick with Xively and take my chances........

35

Also looked at grovestreams as alternative to cosm/xively, that is doing so weird with their new "develop deploy products" blabla. And the API looks much richer than Pachube (what xively actually hosts) : concepts of users, organisations, components (with templates), folders and dashboards etc. Limited to 150/350 API calls an hour. Also supports SSL. The API-key is not a generated "plain text password", but a real symetric crypto key, so it is not compatible at all with existing usages. Apparently it also only supports JSON, no plain text nor XML.

So it looks very powerful, a superset of xively etc, but seems not obvious to use, as there are only 2 Java and one Python code example. Nothing for Arduino C++ etc.

36

Well, I took the plunge and got my stuff going into the grovestreams.com site. I did it first on the raspberry pi since I moved my house controller over to one of those little devices, then I did it again with an arduino. When I started the process, there wasn't an example for an arduino on the site, but I asked, and got an example that I could try out.

Their example worked on my first try. However, it works off a temperature probe and I was too lazy to hook one up and just used a random number instead of the probe. It worked fine for a few hours but I started noticing that the arduino was losing ram since they were using Streams in the sample. I contacted them and they came up with a different example that seems to be pretty good. Obviously it isn't exactly the way I'd do it, but it works and really illustrates what can be done.

I didn't buy into tochinets discussion of the richness of the API until I was chasing bugs in my code and it turns out that the site can do just about anything you could want for logged data. They'll even average the data so you can chart it that way. I complained about the (to me) obscure way some of the facilities are presented and they ... (wait for it) ... replied.

Yep, they actually answered my mail. This place is new and just coming online for folks like us, and they answer questions. I was told they were going to have a forum later when they have the time to attend to it and they have a very easy to follow tutorial on the arduino now.

My house is recording data there on a minute basis, and except for the occasional bug in my own code, has done fine. I'd post my code that is live, but it's in python and running on a Pi now. The arduino code I did was just to see how hard it would be to do the same thing on one of them. Obviously I have too much free time.

One of the really cool features is that I can create an alert that will send email to me when something happens. I created one based on power usage such that when my house power usage goes over 10kWh, it sends me an email. That's so cool. My house lets me know it's using too much power from a web service out in space somewhere. (I'm easily entertained). I haven't even begun to use the things they have available, and probably won't for a while.

Nope, this site ain't free. But, it looks like us experimenters can keep under the billable level with a little attention so that it'll cost us nothing to experiment and track a few sensors. It could wind up costing us if we expand to a whole bunch of stuff being logged really often, but the pricing looks waaaay more favorable than Xively went to.

One of the things that confused me at first was the huge description of organizations, components, streams and such. It took a bit to get past that. What they have is a site for things like smart toasters. You buy the toaster and when you hook it to your wireless at home, it signs into grovestreams, gets an id, and begins to log how much toast you eat. This takes some smarts on the web app because, as we all know, toasters are dumb. However, that stuff can get confusing, so I recommend first taking a look at the arduino example because that's something we understand. They also have a 'sandbox' that illustrates a lot of the features that we might want to use; recommended reading.

I don't have a blog post on my site about this service yet, but I should have later today. I was impressed.

37

Thanks for paving the way on this.

38

You're welcome, I guess this has become a hobby for me. I got the blog post up and have the code I used first to try it out on the arduino there. I don't have the newest code; seems I saved it somewhere and lost track of it.

enjoy if you're into this kind of thing.

39

This seems to be quite ok
http://www.grovestreams.com :slight_smile:

I hope it woult stay free for small usage users

40

Just tried to register with Grovestreams, it was quite an effort. The site does not seem to play well with Firefox. Chrome was much better. Anyone else notice this?