New Features – Internet of Things

Introducing ThingSpeak Gauges!

Hans Scharler — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 15:47:14 +0000

The ThingSpeak IoT has been building a new framework to support widgets on channel views. Widgets can be added to the public or private view of a ThingSpeak channel and even be embedded in 3rd-party systems and dashboards. The first widget that we are releasing is the gauge!

At the recent Boston TechJam, MathWorks had a ThingSpeak People Counter that used face detection to count people that came over to our booth and learned about our demo. The people counter uses MATLAB to identify faces in a live video stream from a webcam, count the number of faces, and send the results to ThingSpeak. The code and instructions for the ThingSpeak People Counter project are on File Exchange.

I used the new ThingSpeak gauge widget to show the visitors the lastest people count. The gauges are easy to set up, you don’t have to edit JavaScript code, just point-and-click and configure options. You can add custom colored ranges, units, and display options. If you want to learn more about ThingSpeak channel display widgets and gauges, visit the MathWorks Documentation for ThingSpeak.

Now that we have the infrastructure for widgets on ThingSpeak, we can more widget types. What other widgets would you like to see on ThingSpeak?

Organize Your ThingSpeak IoT Channels with Tags!

Hans Scharler — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 20:17:50 +0000

I am excited to announce a number of new features that are available to all ThingSpeak users. We added the ability for ThingSpeak channels to be organized by tags. ThingSpeak channels have a “tags” setting that allows you to enter some tags separated by a comma. I use them to organize my channels by a project identifier. In some of my projects, I need a few channels to represent the system. By tagging both channels with the same project identifier, I can see the related channels. We have added a search box to help you search by tags. You can also click on a tag within your channel list to see only the channels that match.

We also added support for tags within the ThingSpeak User API. Just pass the same tag into the API call to ThingSpeak, and you will receive a list of channels that match. This is really useful for integrating ThingSpeak into enterprise systems and for automating channel creation by deployed devices.

All of the tag-related features are available today to all ThingSpeak users!

Clearing Channels (feature request)

Hans Scharler — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:51:59 +0000

ThingSpeak forum user “nr” requested a feature to clear a channel (without having to delete the channel and then build a new one). We recently added the feature under the Channel settings. Often while testing your code you are sending random data to your channel. This feature allows you to reset the channel after you had a chance to perfect your code.

Thanks for the feature request, “nr”. Take this as an open invitation to everyone else…If you have questions, comments, or feature requests, feel free to send them in!