Apologies if this is an easy question to answer, however I have the following challenge:
I have my own Industrial Ubidots account (Professional).
Another person has their own account with devices.
I would like to simply extract the data from the device on the other persons account and display it as a device on my account (all variables, continuously updated).
Is there an “easy” way to do this WITHOUT an API, or is API the only way to do this?
Apologies in advance if this is a silly question, I am not super familiar with APIs, and I have searched the documentation, community forum, and google for some sort of an answer. I have been provided a token and device ID of the device I would like to use.
The easiest way to extract data from one account and display it continuously in another is by using Ubifunctions. The technique is called “data polling” on which you set up a Ubifunction to run on a regular basis, say every 5 minutes, the Ubifunction has to be programmed in a way that makes an API call to the variable(s) you are interested in pulling data from the other account using endpoint such as (check the hiperlinks):
Raw data series to pull data from multiple variables, by setting the limit to 1 it will give you the last value of each variable.
Variables endpoint will allow you to retrieve data for a given variable.
If you have not used Ubifunctions before, here you can find an article to help you get started. Refer to the use case of “Extract data from 3rd party APIs” even though in this case you would be pulling data from another Ubidots account.
There are some things to consider:
Costs: The professional license covers 1000 Ubifunctiosn executions and from there on it costs $5 USD per million extra, for more information check our pricing here.
On the account, you will be pulling data from the operation of data extraction has a cost measured in dots out, for more information check this article where we explain this a bit further.