Adafruit IO Basics Feeds

2017-03-16 | By Adafruit Industries

License: See Original Project

Courtesy of Adafruit

Guide by Todd Treece

Overview

Feeds are the core of the Adafruit IO system. The feed holds metadata about the data you push to Adafruit IO. This includes settings for whether the data is public or private, what license the stored sensor data falls under, and a general description of the data. The feed also contains the sensor data values that get pushed to Adafruit IO from your device.

You will need to create one feed for each unique source of data you send to the system. For example, if you have a project with one temperature sensor and two humidity sensors, you would need to create three feeds. One feed for the temperature sensor, and one feed for each humidity sensor.

First, let's take a look at how to create a new feed using Adafruit IO.

Creating a Feed

Creating a Feed on Adafruit IO is a very simple process. When you login to your io.adafruit.com account, you will see a list of your current dashboards like the list shown below.

Click the Feeds link on the left hand side of the screen to navigate to the Feeds list.

Next, click on the Actions menu on the left hand side of the screen.

Next, click on the Create a New Feed menu item.

A form modal will launch, and you will be presented with two text inputs:

• Name - A short descriptive title of your data. Letters, numbers, and spaces are valid characters, and this field is required. The feed name must be unique for your account.
• Description - A long form description of your data. This field is not required, but it's useful to provide a detailed description if your feed will be public.

Click the Create Feed button once you have finished entering your feed's name and description. You will then be redirected to your new feed.

Next, we will look at how to edit a feed.

Editing a Feed

If you need to change the name, key, or description of your feed, you can do that by navigating to your feed and clicking the gear icon under the Feed Information menu on the right hand side of the screen.

You will be presented with a form so you can edit the name, key, and description of the feed. The key for a feed can be used when accessing the feed programatically. By default, the key is a lowercase version of your feed name with any spaces replaced with dashes. You can modify the key to be any unique combination of lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes.

Click Save once you have finished editing the values.

License Settings

If you are sharing data publicly, you should set the appropriate license for your data. You can choose to reserve all rights for the data, or license it under any of the Creative Commons licenses in the list.

To change the license for your feed, click on the gear icon under the License menu on the bottom right of the screen. You will be presented with a list of licenses to select from. Click on the license to save your selection.

You will then be presented with a menu of licenses to select from.

Click on the Save button to save your license selection.

Privacy Settings

If you would like to share your data publicly, you can change your feed's privacy settings to make the feed public. To do this, you will need to click on the gear icon under the Privacy menu on the right hand side of the screen.

Select either Public or Private from the menu, and click the Save button to change feed visibility.

Notification Settings

When notifications are activated, Adafruit IO will send an email to alert you if no new data has been received for your feed within the given amount of time. To change the notification settings for your feed, click on the gear icon under the Notifications menu on the right hand side of the screen.

Next, enable notifications by selecting ON from the status menu, and selecting a timeout. Click Save when finished.

History Settings

Turning history off for your feed will mean only the last value received is stored. History is on for all new feeds by default, but you can turn history off if you would like to push large values. By default you can push values up to 1KB in length, but with feed history off, you can publish values up to 100KB in length.

To change the history settings for your feed, click on the gear icon under the Feed History menu on the right hand side of the screen.

Next, enable or disable history by selecting ON or OFF from the menu, and click Save.

Deleting a Feed

If you would like to delete a feed, you will first need to navigate back to the list of feeds by clicking on the Feeds menu item on the left hand side of the screen.

Once the list of feeds has loaded, you will need to click on the checkbox next to the feed you wish to delete.

Next, click on the Actions menu and select Delete Selected Feeds from the list of options to delete your feed.

Next, we will look at how you can download the data from your feed in various formats.

Downloading Feed Data

If you would like to download all of the stored data from your feed, you can do so by navigating to your feed from the Feeds list. Click on the name of your feed to load it.

Next, click on the Actions menu below the feed chart.

Select Download All Data from the actions menu.

Finally, click on one of the available formats to download your feed data in that format.

Next, we will look at the options for interacting with feeds using the REST API and client libraries

Feed API

If you would like to learn more information about accessing feeds via the Adafruit IO REST API, you can check out the official API documentation.

We also have a growing list of client libraries. Each library supports reading, creating, updating, and deleting feeds. Visit the links below to learn more about the library you wish to use.