Help with monitoring a switch and writing data to the Internet (Make Cloud Fridge Project)

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I am a total newbie at this, and I’m just looking for some gentle pushes in the right direction.

There was a project in MAKE Magazine called the CloudFridge. I am essentially replicating this exact same project, but with a cabinet door (magnetic normally-closed switch) and a Spark Core. All I want is to have the Spark Core detect when the door is opened, and for how long. Then I want to have the Spark Core send this data to the Internet. It can go to a service like Xively.com, or it can send it to a custom URL. I can build a web app that will receive the data as a post. I would prefer that the data go to a service as that will be much quicker to implement.

This sounds like a seriously simple app, just monitor a pin and record when it changes state and for how long. It’s the sending the data to the net that is an unknown to me.

Can you guys point me to an example project… or even another forum post that could get me started? Thank you so much!

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The easiest way is to use Spark.variable() to expose the variable(s) you wish to monitor and then to use curl or wget or Perl or Python or Javascript or even a web browser to monitor. See http://docs.spark.io/#/api/reading-data-from-a-core-variables

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Check out my service at http://atomiot.com.
Super easy to log variables and view in a graph.

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