Xively, formerly Cosm, and in the beginning, named Pachube, has gone a little wacky. They have a new article on their site , The Dangers of DIY, declaring “the era of DIY has passed“. To be fair their angle is about helping organizations productize and monetize their IoT products but please, let’s not be so cynical.
DIY is here to stay.
I used Pachube when I was just learning about Arduinos and how to hack wifi routers with OpenWRT, running python scripts to collect sensor data and send it to “the cloud”. I was in contact with a brilliant fellow named Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, and had the opportunity to help with a simple javascript issue. I was skeptical when they renamed the service to Cosm, and then finally left them when LogMeIn took over and renamed the service to Xively. I was generously grand-fathered in to my free account, but the uncertainty left me less than enthusiastic about their service.
Now, in my home automation system, I’m running all open source software. I keep all my data on my own Raspberry Pis in a round robin database (Whisper). I use Node-Red as the central coordinating component and I use Graphite/Grafana as the charting and data analysis component.
My last DIY integration was adding a chatbot system using a Raspberry Pi, Rocket.chat, and Hubot to manually control lights and to be informed of any changes in the state of the system. The next phase will be to move into voice control. Fun awaits.
Yes, the reports of the death of DIY are greatly exaggerated…
Tinaja Labs 