Hans on IoT

ThingSpeak, MATLAB, and the Internet of Things

Create a GPS Tracker with MATLAB Mobile and ThingSpeak

Takuji Fukumoto, an Application Engineer at MathWorks, shared a project with me that he created that uses capabilities of MATLAB Mobile™, MATLAB Drive™, MATLAB Online™, and ThingSpeak™. His project uses MATLAB Mobile to send its position and sensor data to ThingSpeak. He then uses MATLAB® to process the data and generate maps of his position.

You might have noticed recently on ThingSpeak that you can link your ThingSpeak user account to a MathWorks Account. By doing so, you have access to other MathWorks products and services that you can use with the same user account. MATLAB Mobile is a native Apple or Android app that allows you to evaluate MATLAB commands, create and edit files, view results, acquire data from sensors, and visualize data. MATLAB Mobile also has thingSpeakRead and thingSpeakWrite functions built-in. One exciting aspects of MATLAB Mobile is that you can capture the sensor data of the mobile device and send it to MATLAB Online.

To take the project further, you can use additional toolboxes from MathWorks to preprocess the data and do advanced mapping. Takuji demonstrates using the Signal Processing Toolbox™ to filter, down sample, and remove outliers from the incoming data from the MATLAB Mobile sensors. Using the Mapping Toolbox™, he plots the latitude and longitude of his mobile device on a WPS map and displays the map on a ThingSpeak channel.

Takuji has shared all of the source code and steps on File Exchange so you can replicate this project on your own mobile device. Check out his project on File Exchange and see his raw data and visualizations on ThingSpeak.

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