November 2020 – WEE Blogs

Internet of Things (IoT) is about connecting various devices (sensors, controllers, display units, alarms and any such instrument/equipment) with each other using public internet and may partly run through private network of the end user.

With this primary capabaility, IoT opens out many opportunities for systems control, remote data monitoring and to execute commands that carry out various operations based on desired conditions.

With improved data connectivity and availability + the reducing prices of electronic devices, IoT is picking up fast and more importantly it is also getting easier for hobbyists and individuals to deploy IoT projects all by themselves.

Besides the hardware and software to implement any IoT project, what is equally important is a consistent and fairly reliable mechanism to receive and store the data points in a (near) real time manner.

Setting up such a data store can turn out costly, but there are many such online services available. For industry grade volumes and quality of service/reliability, such data logging services providers offer various plans with different charge structures.

For hobbyist and DIY users, most if not all these online services offer a free option but obviously with limited resources granted to the user.

A few of the popular service providers are listed below, this is just a very small list.

Let us see how to open an account and create a data logging channel with one of the service providers, namely thingspeak.com

Create an account with ThingSpeak

From your computer or mobile phone connected to internet, open the web browser and go to the URL link ThingSpeak SignUp

Enter your email address and Country and First Name, Last Name on the sign-in page, then click Proceed / Next / Continue button. We recommend using the same personal Google email id as you use on your mobile phone google account.

It will warn you about your email address being personal email id. Refer the image below. Please Tick / Select the check box near Use this email… and click Continue button. After this it will display a message mentioning about having sent a link to your email address.

Open your e-mail box and find the mail received from ThingSpeak, check if the email has gone into spam folder. Please ask for resending the mail again, if required, by clicking the Send Me the Mail Again link.

Locate the URL link available in the email that you received and click the link or button or copy paste that URL link in a new browser tab/window. Please keep the previous tab/window of ThingSpeak still open for further use.

This new tab/window (not shown here) which you opened from your email by clicking the verification link / button – will show some message like your account/email after successful verification. This is actually a mathworks account which is another website like ThingSpeak, both of which share common authentication and some other such few features.

After this verification is successful, resume in the previous ThingSpeak tab/window, by clicking the Continue button.

It will take you to sing-up page where you will be asked to specify your user id and password for ThingSpeak login. Please set a valid user id and password for your ThingSpeak account, this is entirely different and not connected with your email address. Remember and/or note down the user id and password for future use.

Then proceed to login to ThingSpeak web site or you will be automatically logged into ThingSpeak.

At the first login it may ask for some additional information like – what purpose you plan to use ThingSpeak for, (refer next image). Please specify non-commercial/ personal use and click ok.

Create Channel

A channel is one identifiable register/data store to capture data.

For example let us say – a user has 2 different locations where he /she wants to monitor the ambient temperature and humidity at every 5 minutes continuously.

To be able to do this the user will setup the needed sensors at the respective locations and data acquired by the sensors will have to be posted to some internet based URL. This URL will receive the data values and store them for later use and analysis.

For this example, the user needs to have two different registers or data stores one per location and each register needs to support at least three fields (namely timestamp, Temperature in deg C., Humidity in %).

So it is like two readings one each for the two locations, comprising of 3 field values each will be received and saved every 5 minutes. That is 576 readings per day and over 2 years it will be around 0.42 million or 420000 readings. Each reading is about 40 bytes say, so just 16 MB of data over 2 years. The data volume for these two datastores is not really that high, but it is important that the datastore has to provide a reliable and continously available mechanism of data logging.

When translated in the terminology of ThingSpeak, this means two channels one each with 3 fields of data are necessary to be created.

Thingspeak allows upto 4 channels to be created by every user having a free account.

So let us see how to create a channel.

After the ThingSpeak login account has been created and successfully logged in, it is required that a new channel be created in the page shown below.

Click the New Channel button, the website will take you to next page.

On this page specify a channel name and select / tick against all the 8 fields shown in the page. Then click Save Channel button. There are other two buttons provided as below

Clear Channel – This clears the old data that may have been captured so far in this channel. It is recommended to not clear the channel unless you are sure that you want to lose the data forever.
Delete Channel – This deletes the channel altogether. It is strongly recommend to not click this ever, especially after any of the field device is using the channel.

Important Parameters of the Channel

Please note down the Channel Id, Name and Read and Write API Keys, as it shows in the web page in the API Keys tab. Once the channel is created the Keys and Channel Id can be used by any device/software so that the data to be collected by any field sensor or device can be posted to the channel. These values can be altered any-time by the the user login who created the channel, but if the channel keys are setup in any IoT device as a part of one time configuration then the altered values (especially the Read and Write API keys) need to be updated in all the devices and programs where the old keys were used.

Verifying the channel

Once the channel is created it can be tested by executing below commands in browser address bar.

Write to Channel
https://api.thingspeak.com/update?api_key=WRITE_KEY&field1=123456&field2=0.56

The above comamnd submits and saves one data point with values of two fields to the respective thingspeak channel with matching WRITE_KEY.

Read Channel
https://api.thingspeak.com/channels/CHANNEL_ID/feeds.json?results=20

This comamnd retrieves 20 data point from the thingspeak channel specified by the CHANNEL_ID

View the data graphically

Thingspeak provides a nice and simple way to view the datapoints. It would be a good activity to explore this part in details to understand what options it gives to view the data, i.e. various types of graph, number of datapoints to be viewed etc.
https://thingspeak.com/channels/CHANNEL_ID/private_show

Since the concept was posted in the previous blog Mini Weather Station, many friends and readers reverted with various points and questions.

Trying to address them here.

Open for comments and more questions please….

Why DIY Weather station

Do It Yourself gives a full control and understanding about what and how a certain thing is being implemented and it gives a very good hands on experience. Starting with concepts till actual deployment of the gadget, a DIY weather station is your own mechanism to accurately and directly measure and record the climate and climate changes in your area.

Pre-requisites

What all you need, is below…

A ventilated outdoor space, it can be a balcony / terrace, but no direct sunlight and no direct rainfall, at least where the device will be mounted.
A continously available WiFi data network.
Source of electricity to power the device.
Enthusiasm to participate in climate change and related activities.

Weather already on my cell phone.

Yes, smartphones of current generation do have some kind of temperature and weather data displayed on the home screen.

There is a very rare possibility that your phone has an actual temperature sensor inbuilt in its hardware Environment Sensors in Phones.
Even if there is one such sensor, the temperature displayed from time to time will be at various places including indoor and outdoor as the phone is carried along by the user. And we want to record and track the weather conditions at a specific open ambient place.
On most common phones i.e. without a temperature sensor as a part of their hardware, the displayed value is often fetched from some weather services website like AccuWeather
Real time data shown from such websites is a fairly complicated calculation, which involves the actual readings from the nearby weather stations (official, public, private, owned by government bodies or institutions) + the data continuously recorded by weather satellites at various locations. Weather satellites donot measure actual temperature but infer the values based on infra-red scanning of the earths surface. How does weather satellite work
So the correctness of the temperature displayed on the home screen of your phone is dependent on several factors like the distance from the nearest weather station and weather satellites.
Also it is important that we should be able to record data at regular intervals and later be able to compare the values year over year in form of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly min,max and average/median temperatures. Most weather services websites donot provide historical datapoints easily and free of cost.
There are not many known/closely located weather stations in India, or at least information about them and their readings are not published.

Looking at all the above points, it will be meaningful to have more weather stations through public participatory approach at various places. The data can be valuable in terms of analysing the effect of trees, water bodies, streets congested with traffic, and seasonal changes on the ambient temperature.

Why invest in a weather station?

This is purely optional and voluntary. If anyone wants to participate, it is for his/her own interest in and commitment towards protecting the environment and addressing issues related to the environment. There are many many ways in which efforts can be put in to preserve our environment. Participating in this weather station initiative is just one of them.

Costing

The cost of components used in the DIY weather station is about 1100 to 1300 INR. We are happy to assemble/package the components in a working unit and provide to the participants willing to install at their place. The recurring cost of operations is mainly in two parts.

Cost of the wifi data – It is estimated that the unit will post 100 characters of data over your local wifi connection every 2 to 5 minutes, that is about 72KB of data per day, lets say not more than 1 MB per day. This is really not much of data for an existing internet connection. With current data quota values supported by most of the broadband and mobile service providers, this is not likely to incurr any additional costs.
Cost of electricity to run the device – It is measured to consume between 2 to 3 watts of electrical power continuously, this means that within 14 to 20 days of operation the device will consume 1KWH unit of electricity, amouting to about 4 to 8 INR, which means an additional monthly electricity bill of about 10 to 12 INR

Don’t have a WiFi connection

In such a case, a dedicated mobile-SIM based data connection with a WiFi dongle can be arranged, but that will mean additional costs.

One time cost of the dongle device – approximately 1000 INR for most service providers.
Recurring monthly cost of service provider – It is approximately 100 INR at a minimum with most of the service providers in India. If there is any service provider which supports much lesser monthly charges with low data quota per day (we are ok even at, as low as 10-20 MB per day, literally) then it will be more practical.