[rubypgh] December meeting - 1st half will be Hans Scharler speaking about ThingSpeak
Carol Nichols
I was contacted by Hans Scharler, who works on ThingSpeak and is interested in presenting to the group about it. I think this sounds very relevant to our interests, so I'm slotting him in for 7:30-8pm. If anyone would like to speak in the 8-8:30 part of the meeting, that's still up for grabs.
Here is some background info from Hans about ThingSpeak:
ThingSpeak is an open source web application and API to manage devices, to create device interacts, and to store data. Users can use the hosted version of ThingSpeak or setup instances on their own servers by getting the source code from GitHub. The technology behind ThingSpeak is Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0, EventMachine, Phusion Passenger, Nginx, and Memcached to form a highly scalable infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things and its data model requirements.
You use ThingSpeak to Send and Receive "data" via simple HTTP requests, much like going to a web page and filling out a form. Data can be from anything -- Blood Sugar Levels measured by a glucose meter, Server Usage and Uptime reported by servers, or Location Info from a mobile phone. Once the data is in ThingSpeak, you can build applications that retrieve the data, use the data for process decision making, and reporting.
Data is stored in a ThingSpeak Channel. Each channel allows you to store up to 8 fields of data up to 255 alphanumeric characters; 4 dedicated location fields for Location Description, Latitude, Longitude, and Elevation; Status Update to augment the data; and a Time Date Stamp to time code each piece of incoming data.
ThingSpeak has over 1200 active users, 500 private server installs, and successfully licensed to commercial partners to power their upcoming products and services. ioBridge created and maintains ThingSpeak, and specializes in cloud services for devices and applications as well as embedded hardware expertise specifically for remote control and monitoring of “things”.
http://community.thingspeak.com
https://github.com/iobridge/ThingSpeak
Hans is also involved with the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, Pittsburgh Ignite, and HackPGH.