Connecting the "dots" to the Internet of Things with projects and thoughts to stimulate your next IoT Solution or Integration.
Cellular-enabled IoT is here — and it’s making long-range connectivity easier and more affordable than ever. Here’s Ubidots’ top 6 affordable cellular IoT hardware devices. Continue reading “Top 6 affordable cellular IoT hardware devices”
Dear tinkerers, we’ve got more free tools to add to your toolkit. For your next IoT project, you can send and receive data through Hologram’s global cellular connectivity—and easily set up custom visualizations through Ubidots’ application builder. For free!
Cellular infrastructure has been slow to accommodate IoT—making it a headache to get your IoT devices up and running on cellular networks. Hologram.io, a secure global cellular network, and Ubidots, an IoT enablement platform, are working to change that. Continue reading “You can now build your own LTE-connected IoT project—completely free”
Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when you make an emergency call? When you dial the local emergency line in Medellín, Colombia, a medical team of 3—a doctor and 2 pre-hospital care technicians—work under immense time pressure to determine the care needed, and dispatch the nearest appropriately equipped ambulance in a matter of minutes.
Until recently, this already high-stress process was fairly manually—prone to inefficiency and human error (i.e. misidentifying the closest ambulance). Pre-GPS, and still wading through handwritten medical records in 2013, Medellín’s emergency response teams relied on radio communication to identify and dispatch the closest ambulance with the necessary equipment. Continue reading “IoT for Healthcare: Medellín health tech company boosts emergency response time with IoT-powered ambulances”
Beginning in the early 1990s connecting to the internet began as a simple direct path. Now days things have advanced and have become more complex but also more capable. Instead of a single Ethernet connection to the internet, microcontrollers and other devices can no connect through a long list of protocols: Bluetooth, WiFi, BLE, ZigBee, 3G, 4G, 5G, NFC, RFID, SigFox, DigiMesh, Thread, and 6LoWPAN to name a few. Each of these connections play a valuable role for device connection and data transmission, but one budding protocol we would like to highlight is LoRaWan.
The challenges of building out your first IoT solution from prototype to production (and how Ubidots helps you solve them).
The Internet of Things (IoT) was built to solve messy, real-world problems—and the journey to integrating IoT technology into broader informational ecosystems is almost always equally messy. That’s why IoT isn’t something you can buy in a store (or anywhere else), neatly packaged up and ready to go. You’ll need to either build your IoT solution with lots of time, patience and TLC, or connect your devices to an application enablement platform platform that has solved similar problems before—potentially cutting down your development of an IoT application from 18 months to under a day. This article will walk you through both paths to IoT implementation.
Continue reading “How to build an IoT application in under a day”
MQTT is an “Internet of Things” connectivity protocol. Designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium (Source: MQTT.org).
Continue reading “Top 3 online tools to simulate an MQTT client”
The ESP8266 is a microcontroller developed by Espressif Systems. Known as a WiFi Module, this microcontroller has the ability to perform WiFi related activities like Internet of things applications and home automation. Ranging in price and features, there are many types of ESP8266 modules available, but all of them are incredibly useful for IoT world.
Regardless of the IoT application you’ve developed, when using the ESP8266, you must set the WiFi credentials into the ESP8266’s firmware to establish the required connections and be able to send data to the cloud. This is one way to connect, but you can also build your own access point into the board making an universal firmware which will establish a connection in any network available just by pressing a button.
Continue reading “Connect your ESP8266 to any available Wi-Fi network”
The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a client-server protocol powering most of World Wide Web. Every time you surf the web, your browser is sending HTTP request messages for HTML pages, images, scripts, and styles sheets. Web servers handle these requests by returning response messages containing the requested resource, completing the HTTP request-response cycle.
Just like your browser or mobile phone interact with the web through HTTP requests, IoT devices also make HTTP requests to external servers to get their data online. In this guide we describe some available tools to simulate a HTTP requests from a client to a server like Ubidots. Hopefully this will help you test your IoT communication before actually coding your device. Let’s get started! 🙂
Continue reading “Top 4 online tools to simulate HTTP requests”
Today, companies in many heavy industries such as manufacturing, power generation, oil & gas, renewables, metals, chemicals, and mining are applying predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques to their multi-million dollar global operations to reduce the costs and downtime associated with unexpected critical machine failure and damage.
In many ways, a doctor-patient relationship is a good analogy to the technician-machine relationship in terms of trying to understand the significance of an observed condition. Imagine a patient’s body temperature is higher than normal. This could be caused by several things – some normal (e.g. strenuous exercise) and some that indicate sickness (e.g. fever) that should be treated.
Continue reading “Is there a Human Machine Interface for Predictive Maintenance?”
