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  1. Help
  2. Getting Started
  3. Features

Getting Started with Tinamous.com

Features

In this section we look at the core features of Tinamous.

Sensor Measurements

Devices (and Members) can submit sensor measurements, these can then be visualised on the devices chart, or the dashboard, and may also be used to invoke notifications.

A sensor measurement would be something like Temperature, Humidity, etc. Submitting many sensor measurements in one go groups the measurements together, you can also assign meta-data to this group by adding in special fields (see below).

Tinamous is a real-time platform so submitting historical sensor measurements may result in the measurement being missed by the aggregation that occurs. Due to the potential high frequency of a sensor measurement Tinamous creates aggregated historic sets of data. When you request a chart over a long time period it is these that are displayed. If you need to see sensor measurements point by point queries should be limited by the number of points and time range.

Measurements support a number of special fields for adding meta-data to the measurement. These include:

  • Tag, Tags: Apply a tag to the sensor measurement so if can be grouped for visualization or as an indicator (e.g. "QC" may mean the sample was a quality control sample. This should be comma separated values.)
  • Channel: Where you have many fields and some have the same name (e.g. temperature) you can use the channel to differentiate (this should be numeric and defaults to 0.)
  • SampleId: A free form text field to designate a sample id for traceability.
  • OperatorId: Use this to specify a free form Operator Id, i.e. who was operating the device to take the sample measurement.
  • ps-soc, Battery, BatteryLevel, BatteryLevelPercentage: Any of these field names can be used to set the devices battery level property. It should be in %.
  • RfStrength: Indicate the RF strength at the sample time.
  • Lat, Latitude: Set the sample location latitude.
  • Long, Longitude: Sets the sample location longitude.
  • elevation, altitude: Set the sample location elevation/altitude (uses the elevation property of the location object).
  • Location, LatLong, GPS, G: Specify one of these field names to set the sample location. It should be a decimal co-ordinate (e.g. 0.61,52.34) you can specify a 3rd parameter to also set the elevation/altitude.

Typically sensor measurements are submit via:

  • POSTing to the SENML API.
  • Publishing to the MQTT server via the Measurements topic.
  • From a Particle.io device by publishing a "senml" event.
These measurements would normally be in the senml format. However other formats are supported, see the ParticleBot and MQTT pages for further help.

You can export the sensor measurements in csv format by using the Export function on the device page.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a user configurable board. You may have multiple dashboards. These may be to highlight certain devices or to provide better formatting for smaller screens (e.g. mobile/tablet)

By default each member gets four dashboards:

  • Desktop: A general dashboard
  • Phone: A dashboard optimised for small screen devices.
  • Tablet: A dashboard optimised for medium screen devices.
  • MyDashboard: This is a blank canvas ready for you to add widgets as you like.

Please note that due to the limitations of the dashboard framework, resizing of widgets only happens on page refresh. If you resize a widget please save the changes and refresh the page.

Timeline

The timeline is a reverse date ordered list of status post messages. You may add a post to the timeline by using the text box on the timeline page or by POSTing to the Status API. ParticleBot devices may also publish with an event name "status".

Status posts that appear on the timeline may also be used to trigger notifications. For example a temperature sensor may send a "Overheating" status message, this can be picked up using notifications to send you an email, or trigger a Particle Photon to turn a fan on.

Alerts

Alerts are a way to communicate that something important has happened that should be investigated. They can be of different levels to indicate the severity of the issue.

Notifications

Notifications can be used to send email, sms or many other form of notifications when an event of interest occurs.

Read more about Notifications.

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