The Internet of Things (IoT) can help you get the right data from your hardware when you need it, no matter if you are right there with the hardware or a world away.  Two new hardware examples recently dropped at the MathWorks site, so we are highlighting those examples here. We’ve added one more interesting example found out on the wild web, to make a nice three-for. 1. IoT-Based Temperature Monitoring Using ThingSpeak and Arduino Hardware – MATLAB & Simulink Environmental monitoring is one of the standout applications of IoT technology, and where the ease of getting set up on Thing ..read more

The MATLAB AI Chat Playground was launched on the MATLAB Central community at the end of November. I recently got the chance the interview the chatbot about ThingSpeak. I was curious how much it knew about building IoT projects on ThingSpeak and data analysis with MATLAB. Here are some excerpts from my first conversation. Me: Can you read and plot the temperature from field 4 of the weather station at ThingSpeak channel 12397? Show 120 minutes. AI: Great, lets see what the code does by inserting it into the code editor and clicking run.   Woah! I’m pretty impressed. Lets go a little fur ..read more

If you want to upgrade your ThingSpeak capabilities, have a look at the ThingSpeak repository of template codes that open in MATLAB Online. ThingSpeak has MATLAB built in to make it easy to analyze and visualize your data, but the text window for MATLAB analysis and MATLAB visualizations can be tricky to use. Imagine you wanted to peek at your variables while the code is running, or step through the code, or get any of the standard benefits that come from using a development environment. You can use MATLAB Online to edit and test your MATLAB code before using it in ThingSpeak. To try it out ..read more

“MATLAB and ThingSpeak extended tools necessary for remote learning and technologies covered by our course. Project-based learning benefited from MathWorks’ high-level programming, simulation, and IoT platform,” Dr. Martin Ernek, Slovak University of Technology The Slovak University of Technology is the largest technical university in the Slovak Republic and they belong to MathWorks’s Campus Wide License model – along with more than 2000 universities worldwide. The university has almost 11, 000 students and offers education in technical fields and involves students in research in natural scien ..read more

Professor Chao Wang at Arizona State University recently introduced a course on AI and IoT to first-year engineering students. Deep learning in MATLAB is used to classify images and send the results to ThingSpeak in the cloud. ThingSpeak allows the class to aggregate the results and compare their work in real time. Read the article here: Introducing Deep Learning and IoT to First-Year Engineering Students with MATLAB l ..read more

Many users have asked, and it’s finally here: Your devices can upload images to ThingSpeak! With this new feature, you can create a cloud-based tracking or monitoring system for your important assets by taking photos and uploading them to ThingSpeak image channels. Users with a paid ThingSpeak license can create image channels and then embed the output from the image channel onto a channel view using the image widget. To help you get started, the ThingSpeak documentation includes two examples for uploading images to ThingSpeak: ESP32-CAM camera module and Raspberry Pi-connected camera. Many T ..read more

We’ve set up a new way to monitor the traffic and made some unexpected discoveries using MATLAB along the way. You may be familiar with the ThingSpeak traffic monitor channel that uses a image processing from a webcam to count cars on a busy highway. My friends and collaborators Alan Kafka at Weston Observatory, Boston College and Jay Pulli at Raytheon let me know that we might be able to verify the traffic data with seismic analysis.  So, we bought a Raspberry Shake® seismograph and set it up on the ground floor three floors below the traffic monitor.  Here’s a picture of ..read more

Starting with iOS 14, Apple introduced widgets for the iPhone and iPad. Widgets elevate information to the top of your device and offer information at a glance. They help you customize your device in new ways. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a ThingSpeak widget on your iPhone? Thanks to a new app called Scriptable you can put ThingSpeak data widgets on your iOS devices. Scriptable allows you to write your own widgets using JavaScript and run the scripts on your iOS device. Anil Patro shared a starter template to create a ThingSpeak Graph widget using JavaScript on GitHub. You can use Anil ..read more

ThingSpeak has released an update to the MQTT service that improves access control and device management for IoT projects. This new interface is available to all ThingSpeak users. Learn more in the ThingSpeak Doc. If you have used ThingSpeak MQTT in the past, I wanted to mention one big change to how you access the service. The new MQTT service is available at the hostname: mqtt3.thingspeak.com. If you decide that MQTT is right for your IoT project, you can start by adding a new device to your ThingSpeak account. This will set up the MQTT credentials needed for the device to connect to Thing ..read more

We were searching around for ThingSpeak IoT resources and noticed that Google was sharing the top questions related to ThingSpeak. Christopher Stapels and I thought that it would be fun to answer them and share them as a blog post. So, here we are. How do you use ThingSpeak? Some people use ThingSpeak for monitoring machine processes. This allows them to share the data with potential customers and ensure the process is within control. There are over a million ThingSpeak channels representing a vast assortment of projects.  Some projects measure the temperature and humidity in one room, s ..read more