We have developed a system for anyone to retrieve data sent through Particle.publish with a REST API. This is meant so people can quickly get access to data history, you can simply call into the API with your access token and retrieve the data. No registration, no up-front signups, and it’s all free!
Have questions? We have answers!
What is it? It is a simple REST API to get access to your data, as easily as we could come up with. Any data you have sent with a Particle.publish (in non-PRIVATE mode) from any device (Photon, Electron, RasPi, bluz, etc.) will be available to you. Nothing else you need to do, just call Particle.publish and you can access it.
How does it work? Simple, just call the API like this (well, put in your real device ID and access token first):
curl https://events.bluz.io/devices/b1e2b1e2b1e2b1e2b1e2b1e2\?limit\=10\&access_token\=12345
You will see the last 10 Particle.publish events for your device!
What can I use it for? All sorts of things! This would allow you to really quickly pull data into a website or app, for example, for graphing or reporting. Or you could easily write a script to dump the data to CSV for analyzing it in excel. The point is to let you not have to worry about the back-end storing of data.
Aren’t there others that do this, like Udibots and Grovestreams? There sure are, and we aren’t trying to replace them. We are just laying out another alternative to accessing your data that requires no up-front thought or effort.
Do I have to register first? Nope, just call the API and you will see your published data.
Can other people access my data? Nope. You provide your access token and we verify the events belong to you before you can get access to them. Your access token is never stored, only used to verify ownership.
What about Particle.publish events that are PRIVATE? Sorry, there is only access to public events for now
Is it really free? Yup, go ahead and try it, we’ll wait…
Is this a Particle built feature? No, it is built by us over at bluz.
Ok, what’s the deal? Well, to be honest, we just wanted to see if people will use this type of feature. It has been talked about on the Particle forums for some time, and the feature may be available form Particle soon as well. But we figured we could provide a stop-gap solution, so why not! Plus, we had some AWS credits lying around and wanted to put them to good use, think of this as a public service brought to you by bluz!
So what’s the catch? Nothing really, though we are calling this experimental (think pre-beta even) for now. Based on the volumes of data it requires some careful tuning and we can’t be sure we got it right the first time around. So you probably shouldn’t build a product on top of it, but for home projects or even prototypes we hope it can make your life easier. As the system becomes more stable, we may one day remove the experimental tag altogether.
How long do you store data? Not sure yet. We haven’t set a limit, but we almost certainly will. Current thinking is 3-7 days sounds about right, but if we can go longer without significant performance implications, we will.
Ready to try it? Check out the doc: https://github.com/bluzDK/events.bluz.io-doc