I see many examples with different resources used, such as IFTT, Dashboard, Google spreadsheet; and there are also names like Atomiot and Relayr. There might be others and I am a little dizzssy right now.
Q:
What are these actually and what are the differences? Which one is a third party tool? Which one is useful for sending and storing/recording data from Photon-to-it? (I asked that because I always see that these tools always trigger photon but not photon triggers them.)
Sorry for too many questions, but, actually I am a bit more confused.
Thanks in advance.
I guess you haven’t tried Googling them by any chance ? I’ll give you some resources to check out, perhaps that helps.
IFTTT, IF This Then That. The ‘about page’., and our good old wikipedia.. Simply put, it adheres to Newtons physics in that you can trigger a reaction by a given action. You get an email, and it posts the contents to facebook. You get a tweet and it’ll toggle your smart lights. It connects different internet enabled products.
For Particle, you can use it to trigger action, but you can also trigger things on the Particle by actions from other services. An Email can toggle an LED, but a motion sensor can also trigger an Email. So it can work both ways. The docs also have a page on it. There’s a tutorial over here.
The dashboard. This is a service provided by Particle. You can read about it in the docs over here. It’s an easy way to see your SSEs. If you’ve got an organization and want an easy way to manage your devices, then the dashboard provides functionality for that as well.
Google spreadsheets. It’s basically Excel, but online. You can push information to it, and extract from it as well. In combination with IFTTT for example, it’s an easy way to log data. There are tutorials, here, and here, and if you search a bit, I’m sure there are more.
Atomiot. The home page pretty much says what it does… Easy for logging data, and triggering some actions. Not sure what else to add.
Relayr. I haven’t heard of them before, but they seem to have a pretty elaborate website explaining what they are and what they do…
Give the resources above a read and let us know if that suffices. If not, try explaining what you’re trying to achieve and we might be able to help you out.
Thanks for your quick and through answer. Even though I had checked all the tools that I had mentioned above, I was not able to comprehend them all. Including that a newbie in IoT and started with photon but faced lots of tools and dizzy and not a native English speaker… anyway
I understand that:
1-Particle Dashboard can be referred as imperfect for now and may be poor. There is not basic functions such as recording data and check it later, making charts etc. Just the live view of Spark.publish events.
2-IFTTT and Atomiot almost the same thing and they are both specialized for IoT. They do not have vital differences.
3-Google spreadsheet is another tool that can be used for IoT but somehow it is not that liked by IoT makers in the mean of efficiency and usability. So, there are these tools , IFTTT and Atomiot and etc.
4-Except Particle Dashboard, they are all third party tools.
Please anyone correct me if I am wrong about any of them.
? I’ll give you some resources to check out, perhaps that helps.