Ubidots
Low-code application development for the Internet of Things
New Widget Plugin: Pareto Bar Chart
The Pareto Bar Chart is a typical way to categorize machine downtime reasons in manufacturing applications, such as OEE Monitoring. This new widget offers a simple yet powerful way to improve your existing and future industrial monitoring dashboards.
In a more generic sense, the Widget is capable of breaking down any variable based on any context keys, making it valuable for further IoT applications.
Introducing the Timeline Chart
We’re also happy to introduce the Timeline Chart, a Widget Plugin that aggregates and displays breakdown times in production by grouping time series data. By analyzing when breakdowns occur, you can identify crucial patterns and trends to improve productivity and minimize downtime.
The widget creates a timeline where breakdowns are represented with colored bars whose width is proportional to the aggregated breakdown time. Understanding the timing and frequency of breakdowns helps pinpoint underlying issues, schedule maintenance more effectively, and enhance overall productivity.
Introducing Data Profiling
Our new Data Profiling plugin allows you to create widgets that boost your operation by deeply analyzing time-series data, offering significant correlations and detection of outliers, to include comprehensive descriptive statistics, trend analysis, and report generation.
By providing detailed insights with no coding at all, this tool ensures companies not only save on operational expenses but also enhance productivity through data-driven strategies.
New plugin: Breakdown Bar Chart
We’re happy to introduce the Breakdown Bar Chart, a plugin that offers a simple, yet powerful way to break down time-series data based on context, resulting in a bar chart that's always categorized by month within the dashboard's selected time range.
This can be useful in cases such as OEE measuring: By grouping the different causes of machine downtime through the dot’s context, you can swiftly spot operational patterns and improvement opportunities by figuring out which causes affect machines the most.
Introducing our hosted Helium/ChirpStack LNS
We’re happy to announce the introduction of our new “Helium - ChirpStack LNS” giving you access to Helium’s network —the largest, public LoRaWAN network in the world— in a convenient and simple way.
With support for AU915_1 and US915_1 regions, CLASS A, B, C, and key ChirpStack features, the service not only simplifies operations but also ensures robust functionality and flexibility, catering to a wide range of verticals.
Introducing the Anomaly Detector
We’re excited to announce the introduction of our new Anomaly Detector plugin, a powerful data analysis tool that empowers you to quickly spot irregularities in time series data to take your operation to the next level.
In today's data-driven world, the ability to monitor and analyze time series data is paramount for businesses across various domains. However, amidst the vast and continuous stream of data, identifying anomalies can be an arduous task, often akin to finding needles in a haystack.
Our Anomaly Detector plugin facilitates this process with the use of special algorithms that quantify deviations from the expected data patterns. Additionally, the findings can be easily plotted in your dashboard.
A power-up for your operation
We're introducing the Power Diagram plugin, a tool that allows you to create four-quadrant diagrams in your dashboard to easily visualize energy consumption, thus simplifying the identification of irregularities in electrical systems.
The Power Diagram is a product of our latest generation of plugins —conveniently named Widget Plugins. They're tools that allow you to develop custom widgets that, upon use, are added to the native catalog of widgets.
Introducing Widget plugins
We’re excited to introduce Widget Plugins, a new tool that allows you to become an Ubidots widget developer and cater to your project, company, or clients in a custom, branded, and seamless way. By using a developer console within Ubidots, where you have complete control over HTML, CSS, and JS, the widgets you develop will become available in the dashboard’s widget drawer.
- Code your widget
- Upload it as a plugin
- Let your end users enjoy a custom, native widget experience!
Send alerts from your own Telegram Bot
With our new Telegram plugin you’ll be able to easily set up events in Ubidots that trigger messages in a Telegram group.
Setting everything up takes just a few minutes, after which you’ll have your white-labeled Telegram bot to send alerts to multiple end users, through Telegram groups.
New TCP Gateway Plugin
We’ve released a new plugin that serves as a TCP gateway that routes TCP packets into an HTTPs webhook, so they can be decoded using Python in the plugin's decoder.
It facilitates communication between systems that may use different TCP payloads, enabling compatibility and interoperability. The TCP Gateway plugin can also respond custom packets to TCP clients, which can be specified in the plugins' Python code.
Web Scraper Plugin
We’ve also released a Web Scraper plugin that can be used to extract publicly available, numeric data from websites and store it as an Ubidots variable. Only a few inputs are needed in order to set up the plugin and you can determine the time rate at which the plugin will retrieve the desired data.
New Plugin: IP Camera Stream
If monitoring is all about painting, with data, the best picture possible of something, then what better way to do it than with actual pictures? Video surveillance is an all-time favorite when it comes to monitoring a plethora of processes and locations because of how straightforward it is for us to interpret images. Now, thanks to our new IP Camera plugin, you can add this layer of information to your operation.
With this plugin, you can easily convert an IP camera stream into a live and embeddable web code, so it can be used in your IoT dashboards.
Connect your Ambient Weather stations with Ubidots
Ambient Weather offers one of the most comprehensive and affordable product suites for weather monitoring. Their popular weather stations aren't only equipped with various weather sensors, but also act as a gateway for external indoor and outdoor sensors, such as soil moisture, pollution, or even pool monitoring sensors.
With our new Ambient Weather plugin you can easily bring the data of these devices into your Ubidots account with just a few clicks.
New Plugin: NCD FFT
Prior to IoT, a Maintenance Manager had to call a machine diagnosis expert to determine whether an axis was unbalanced, or a bearing was about to fail. Similar to having a nurse coming to your house to take samples, experts would connect accelerometers to a machine, record the response, and then come back later with a diagnosis. As good as this results were, the process had the following issues:
- It had to be done on-site, no remote option
- It was expensive
With tools like NCD's Wireless Vibration Sensor V3, Ubidots' monitoring tools, and our new Fast Fourier Transform plugin, doing condition monitoring and predictive maintenance for your machines is faster, cheaper, and more convenient than ever.
With the NCD FFT plugin you’ll be able to obtain the Fast Fourier transform of raw acceleration captured through the NCD sensor. With your data now in the frequency domain, you can use our Frequency Chart widget to plot it and enable applications such as vibration analysis for machine health diagnosis.
This plugin is available to all Industrial plans (or higher).
Learn more here.
♒️ Monitor almost any US river in just a few clicks
Add streamflow data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to your IoT application in just a few clicks
WaterWatch is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) service with current water streamflow conditions in the United States.
This Plugin retrieves current real-time streamflow conditions from a specified site number. We've seamlessly integrated with WaterWatch web service so you don't have to, enabling you to use Ubidots to log streamflow data in just a few clicks:
See this article to learn how to monitor almost any US water stream in just a few clicks!
✨ Announcing Ubidots plugins
Ubidots Plugins: The simplest way to connect apps and services to the Internet of Things
IoT is mostly about using sensors and actuators to merge the physical with the digital, transforming processes, companies, or even entire industries! However, a vast amount of physical data already resides in the digital domain, be it in the form of APIs, public datasets, or just a spreadsheet in your computer.
This month, we're proud to announce Ubidots Plugins, a new way of connecting apps and services to the Internet of Things. After seeing how creative our own customers could get when coding their UbiFunctions, be it to track live energy prices, solar irradiance, or weather data, we decided to build a new module to easily integrate with external data sources and services.
What is a Plugin?
A Plugin is an extension of Ubidots' feature set, which is provided by either one of our partners, or the Ubidots team itself.
Plugins come in different flavors, depending on how they reflect in your Ubidots account. Currently, only Data Plugins are supported:
- Data Plugins: These plugins ingest data from external services, and store it in an Ubidots device.
Other types to be enabled in the future are:
- Dashboard Plugins: These plugins specify new types of Widgets that can be added to your dashboards.
- Event Plugins: These plugins specify new types of Event actions, which become available to use within our Events engine module.
Available plugins
Presently, the following Data Plugins are available:
AWS IoT: Stream data from your AWS IoT Devices to Ubidots.
OpenWeather: Weather conditions for a user-defined location, with data from over 200,000 cities.
USGS WaterWatch service: A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) service with current water streamflow conditions in the United States. This plugin will create a device with real-time streamflow conditions from the specified site number.
Fixer: Retrieves user-defined exchange rates from Fixer, using your own Fixer API Access Key.
Daily Exchange Rates: A free Exchange Rates API for current and historical foreign exchange rates published by the European Central Bank.
Please note that plugins are currently only available to Admin users; your App's end users won't see the "Plugins" option in the Devices menu.