Web Access to Photon

Getting Started
1

Hi All,
We run a school project and are specifying a new project to build a weather station.
We want to keep as much of the code free of complexity and we can do that with the board and components.

Our question is, we want to be able to interact with our station from a web site. I know there are JS libraries etc, but building that kind of functionality will be beyond our students.

All we want to do is:

  1. download data from the Particle to ‘the server’ (we plan to store the data on and SD Card)
  2. view current status
  3. clear the SD Card after reading
  4. View some simple graph of the data over time.

Can anyone suggest a platform or framework we can use that doens’t requre our Students to become full-stack developers?

thanks in advance.

jon

2

Any reason for using the SD card, since that might make things more complicated?

You could use Server Sent Events, webhooks, or Variables to get your data out, through the cloud. You can use direct (TCP/UDP) connections as well, but that might be more difficult.
There are some services out there that allow you to plot things like this, Google Docs, ubidots, atomiot, and presumably a bunch more. They each have their pros and cons, which a quick forum search should help identify.
I believe @RWB will be more than happy to explain Ubidots to you :wink:

3

I posted a video I created for a client project that used Ubidots. I shared the video here if you want to watch: Ubidots - A Toutorial Video Overview

1 Like
4

Well, we thought the SD Card for data protection, as we notice that from time to time the Photon loses Wifi connection and of course also battery problems.

5

Thanks for the video, looks good, but I think for our school projects it would be a bit too expensive, always the way with schools!

6

I’m not so sure of that. I’m using free accounts and have never hit a limitation yet. I have tons of sensor variables, way over 5. I think you just start paying if you go over the free amount of datapoints they provide with the free account.

I would just have each kid setup their own account.

@aguspg is one of the owners of Ubidots so maybe he could help out if you would like to move forward with their easy to use and code platform. I have not found anything easier to use yet.

7

OK, I have just set up my ‘boiler plate’ weather station with 5 variable, and have now a nice dashboard for my example temperature and Air Pressure etc.

It is really cool and easy to use. Also like the way you can embed the widgets in another web site, such as a WordPress site.

Now for the hard bit, building and coding the weather station!

2 Likes
8

Yea it took me awhile to figure out that you can embed the dashboard into other websites which is really cool! And you can modify the code to make it show up how you want which is cool.

Can’t beat it for FREE!

Please post your school projects and dashboard screen shots if you do move forward with it, I would love to see it :smiley:

1 Like
9

Hi @jsx001 good to hear this. Feel free to contact us directly for extra capacity and free demo accounts . Happy to support education :slight_smile: agustin@ubidots.com

1 Like