Data Logging

Free data logging website
Internet of Things


 * Xively = COSM = Pachube - http://xively.com/
 * TempoDB - http://tempo-db.com/
 * Nimbits -http://www.nimbits.com/
 * ThingSpeak - http://thingspeak.com/

References:
 * Free data logging website - Arduino Forum - http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,179156.0.html

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Cosm has been around for a while and it is still the most used by the IoT community. AFAIK, there is no restriction on the number of data points you can store for free if you keep your data “public”. Data is structured in “feeds” and “datastreams”. They have an API you can use to push data individually or in batches. You can also use it to backup the data you have in Cosm. Their charts are nice looking but they have predefined time ranges that automatically aggregate your data so you have little control on what and how you want to graph. They have a number of goodies like triggers, graph builder (to insert your Cosm charts in your site), tags, apps, localization based search,…

TempoDB is a relatively new player. It’s free up to 5 million data points per database, that’s roughly 9.5 years for a 1 samples/minute data. You can have several “series” of data per database. Their API is really good and they have a number of clients including a python one :^). Their charts might not be as “pretty” as those from Cosm but you have full control on the data you are visualizing: date range, interval and aggregation functions, and they are FAST (Cosm can be really sluggish sometimes). Your data is private, so there is no sense in having a search tool. They have tags and I’ve been told they are about to release a notification service.

Nimbits has a desktop-like interface base on ExtJS. It is basically a paid service (their free quota is 1000 API requests per day, which is OK for 1 sensor reporting at a rate of 1 samples every 2 minutes) and it costs $20/2 million requests (roughly $20 per year if you have 4 sensors reporting at a 1 sample/minute rate).

ThingSpeak is very similar to Cosm, data is presented in a “channel” where you can see multiple charts for different magnitudes (they call them “fields”), a map and even a video from Youtube. It’s open source, so you can clone the code from Github and install it in you server. Their web service is limited to 1 API request every 15 seconds per channel, which is OK as long as you group all the data from one channel in a single request (that’s it if you have more than one field per channel). For each field you have a lot of options to define your chart: time range, time scale, different aggregation functions, colors, scale,…

nimbits | Tinkerman - http://tinkerman.eldiariblau.net/tag/nimbits/