The Pachube website took off during the Japan Earthquake in March 2011. The subsequent radiation crisis prompted many members of the public to collect live readings of the radiation levels in their local areas across the country. This data often conflicted with the official government readings but in effect it was more accurate, since it offered a map of radiation levels that would respond in real-time to factors such as wind and also allowed locals to see the data specific to their local area.

JAPAN

Pachube is an online service that collects data from an open variety of sources, and connect sensor data

WHAT IS IT?

Pachube is a realtime infrastructure
for THE INTERNET OF THINGS. This term describes the concept of electronic devices becoming active participants in generating content online. In other words, devices that are connected to the internet can make realtime updates and transmit this data to the web. Other devices, that have a connection can also access these updates. An interesting result of the Internet of Things is that devices can be prgrammed to respond to the data of other appliances.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

"Pachube provides most of it functionality through its API. The API makes it quick and easy to create products that connect to the Internet of Things by offering sophisticated realtime data, history and user management."

PACHUBE A.P.I

THE INTERNET OF THINGS.

<< This is an example of an active feed which is collecting data from a radiation monitor in Yokohama, Japan.

-A map, (requested from google), pin-points the location of the monitor, while specific location factors are documented beneath.

- Tags have been put in place to identify the feed. They mark what is being measured, the instrument being used and the location etc.

An API is a particular set of rules that facilitate the interactions between two software programs.

- A developer may require an external program to perform a service that will benefit his own application.

- The external program will have a set of API's written within it's documentation which specify the syntax required to grant access to it's services.

- The developer will need to include this specific syntax in the coding of his application in order to cause interaction between the two programs.

The interaction can be broken down into GET requests and

WHAT IS AN A.P.I?

When web developers are writing the code for their web application, they will include a GET Request to pachube, asking for information. This could be about a specific sensor or several particular datastreams...

...The API receives the Get request and retrieves the information. It then sends it back to the external application.

All the different 'THINGS' are sending data to Pachube in realtime.

The individual data streams may be in a variety of formats- digital/analogue etc.

For data to be linked with other data it must be standardised>PACHUBE

THE PACHUBE API

Pachube is a service that

-The radiation is being detected by a CRM-100 geiger counter. This measures the radiation in counts per minute (cpm).

-Each measurement is transmitted to pachube where the API makes sense of the incoming data.

- The data is added to the graph which records the measurements over time.

-Other graphs record measurements for the absorbed dose, and dose equivalent of radiation.

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An Arduino is an electronic board, on which a circuit is set up and a possible variety of sensors or switches can be connected. These read specific information about their environment and transmit an electronic signal.
The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing) and can be programmed to make responses to the signals passed on by the sensors.

The board opens up the opportunities to develop interactive objects,by controlling tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

COLLECTING DATA

In the Arduino workshop we collaborated on a task which saw us assembling a circuit including a photo sensor and an LED bulb. The photo sensor observed the level of light in the environment and the LED bulb would brighten or dim in response to the signals transmitted by photo sensor.

However it needed programming to function in this way.

Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer. For the workshop we used an arduino board that connected to the computer with a usb.

Arduino comes with some basic examples for communicating with Processing which are useful for when you want to write both Arduino and Processing programs and have them talk to each other. This works best for communicating simple information. We used ''The Arduino library' as it allowed us to control the Arduino board from Processing without writing code for the Arduino.

In processing, any activity on the board would send a value to processing. The Led bulb could be also programmed to respond to the sensitivity of the photo sensor.

To check the board worked we programmed it to sense the light and to respond to the amount of light by the brightness of the LED. When this worked we were able to upload the data to pachube.
For this to happen however we needed the API key from pachube to grant us access.

ARDUINO