Pachube
[See pachube.com and community.pachube.com]
Pachube is a web service available at pachube.com that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.
The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two responsive environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can "talk" and "respond" to each other.
Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two responsive environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data.
People might use Pachube:
- to connect their own objects/environments to sensor data of remote projects (either their own or belonging to others) to create networked geographically separated interactive environments.
- to log their sensor data over time and create graphs that can be embedded in web pages.
- to share their data with others for the purposes of making public particular data trends.
- to have their website respond to the remote sensor data (e.g. enable the background colour of the site to change with sensor values; or have a Flash SWF or Processing applet respond to sensors).
- to connect their Second Life objects to sensors in the physical world or vice versa.
- to monitor remote sensor devices that are not connected to the internet but which are able to update their readings by SMS/text message.
Pachube.com is now live; you can sign up for Pachube here.
Pachube makes use of Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) and an EEML Processing library is available to connect directly to Pachube without needing to know or understand EEML.
There is also a Pachube community site which includes tutorials for beginner/intermediate Arduino and Processing users to connect Arduino to Pachube (both as an input and as an output), and a new Pachuino template.
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