- Hi, I'm Pat Sagsveen.
Welcome to Another Geek Moment video.
Today we're gonna talk about a service
provided by Initial State.
This is an analytics package that helps you to take
a sensor, software
or really anything that can make an HTTP request
and graphically illustrate it on their dashboard
on your browser.
So this is a web-based tool.
How you do it,
you go to the Initial State website, create an account.
You've got three options, really.
There is the free edition,
which gives you about 25,000 samples per month,
there is the standard edition,
which gives you unlimited samples per month,
and then there's the pro tier edition,
which allows you to have unlimited samples plus triggering.
So, you can basically trigger,
you could pick a time when you want to look
at your data or you want to have something
trigger your data to send its information in.
This tool,
it works with data buckets.
So like, for instance, right now
I'm running a program on it
and all I have is the temperature sensor running on there.
So, I've got the temperature sensor.
It's displaying itself in Celsius and Fahrenheit.
I also have
a read switch right now that's acting like a door,
but it's not in this particular bucket of data,
so I'm not actually viewing that right now.
And how it works,
on the script, your account gives you an access key.
So, it's a particular identifier for you.
Right now I'm running this off of a Raspberry Pi.
So there's a bunch of Python script in here,
and in that Python script,
there's a spot where I have my access key,
so every time this outputs a signal
and it sends that to my Pi
and it groups that in with that access key,
you have to have internet access on the Pi,
it sends that to their browser,
and then I can view it on my laptop over here.
And you can keep up to,
on the standard edition,
like I said, it was unlimited,
pro tier, unlimited,
for the free edition, you can keep up to about
a day's worth of information, or it'll store it for a day.
So, on the Initial State,
we'll have links for this below,
there is a PiOT 101 tutorial from GitHub,
and that is what I used when I did this,
and I got all my code off of that,
we'll have links below.
The first little project you do
is with this temperature sensor.
And each individual temperature sensor
that has a digital output, it's gonna have a serial number,
and we can read that using the Pi,
we can read what that serial number is,
link that to the access key and send it out
so that my system here knows that this is this sensor
going through my account, sending it to my account.
And I mean, you can get,
there's a lot of tutorials.
They have one for a weather dashboard
that seems to be popular.
Basically, it'll show humidity, temperature per day.
You can look at a whole month's worth of material
for what the temperature was like.
They've got International Space Station
tracker that you can watch.
There's a lot of tutorials, and they'll all be linked.
I particularly use the Raspberry Pi,
there's, I believe, some BeagleBone stuff,
a lot of different projects you can use with Initial State.
So if you have something that you need analytics done for,
this is definitely something worth looking at.
You can't necessarily control, it's not a control program,
but it is a monitoring program.
We've got,
on the graphical interface,
you can choose a bunch of
different ways to illustrate things.
So you could use either a line graph, bar graph,
pie chart, gauge chart,
map, histogram and summary.
So, I mean there's really a lot of different ways
that you can illustrate information on this.
The map in particular is pretty neat.
You could go on Google Maps,
you could take the GPS location of where you are,
plug that GPS coordinate into your browser,
make an HTTP request
as long as you have your access key on there,
and it'll show you,
basically like Google Maps,
it'll take you right there on the software.
Yeah, pretty nice package
for if you have stuff to monitor,
or if you just wanted to do some projects,
there's a lot of projects you could do to have some fun.
You can subscribe to the Initial State account
on the DigiKey website, we'll have some links below,
along with the tutorial and tools that I used for this video
which will be linked on our eewiki website.
Thank you for watching.
(rock music)