Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5. Internet of Things with Xively
In the previous chapters of the topic, we mainly kept things local when performing meas-
urements on the Arduino board with the Ethernet shield. For example, we sent some meas-
ured data back to a database on your computer and displayed the measurements there.
In this chapter, we are going to take a different approach. We are going to integrate the Eth-
ernet shield into an
Internet of Things
perspective. This means that instead of logging
measurements locally within your local network, we are going to automatically send the
measured data to a cloud service called
Xively
. The purpose of the Xively website is to
store data that comes from your devices and display this data on their website. This way,
your data will be available at any time and can be accessed from anywhere.
The following will be the major takeaways from this chapter:
• First, we are going to build the hardware for this project around the Ethernet shield
and the DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor.
• Then, we will create an account on the Xively website. We will also configure this
account so that we can send the measured data to it using the Arduino Ethernet
shield.
• When the account is correctly set, we will use the account information such as the
Xively API key to build the Arduino sketch for this project.
• Finally, we will upload the sketch to the Arduino board and test it. We will check
that the data is correctly sent to the Arduino board and visualize the recorded data
in real time in your browser.
