Arduino IoT Cloud

Connect the cloud to the world around you.

Arduino IoT Cloud is a powerful service, allowing anyone to create IoT applications with just a few simple steps. With a combination of smart technology, user-friendly interfaces and powerful features, our cloud is for everyone: students, makers, professionals alike.

The latest version of the Arduino IoT Cloud includes features such as:

Directly linked to the Create Environment.
Automatically generated sketches.
Building sensor networks.
Real time data monitoring.
Wi-Fi and LoRa compability.
Build a dashboard with 15+ unique widgets.
Create your own app by using Arduino IoT API.

Additional resources:

Getting started with Arduino IoT Cloud is quick and easy, and will require just two simple steps:

1. Create an Arduino account.

2. Go to Arduino IoT Cloud and start your journey through IoT!

A walk through the Arduino IoT Cloud

The Arduino IoT Cloud is designed to help people create great things with ease. It is as simple as connecting a device, creating properties and a dashboard to monitor it. Whenever we create a thing, a sketch is automatically generated, and updates with all changes we make in the cloud!

Based on what you want to achieve, an IoT application will require a few basic components:

Devices to collect data or control something;
Software to define the behavior of the hardware (e.g., Arduino Sketch);
Cloud application to store data, or remotely control the equipment.

But let's take a look at some essentials of the Arduino IoT cloud!

Devices

Devices are physical objects like a hardware board that can be contained inside a product (e.g., MKR WiFi 1010). They’re the hardware that runs the software, reads sensors, controls actuators and communicates with the Arduino IoT Cloud.

Take a look at the Arduino boards that are compatible with the cloud:

There's also a selection of popular third party boards that are compatible with the cloud. You can find out more about this in the Manager for Linux devices.

Things

Things represent the inherent properties of the object, with as little reference to the actual hardware used to implement them. Each thing is represented by a collection of properties (e.g., temperature, light).

In the cloud, when we create a thing, we also need to link it to the device we are using. However, a device can only be connected to one thing at a time.

Take a look at the image below. It shows how the thing named A_brand_new_thing is linked to a device called Gussie.

Properties

Properties are the qualities defining the characteristics of a system. A property can be something like a 'read-only' (RO) setting to indicate the Arduino IoT Cloud can read the data, but cannot change the value of the property. A property might be designed as 'read and write' (RW) if the Arduino IoT Cloud can also remotely change the property’s value and send an event notification to the device.

For example, let's say we want to create a device that: can read a sensor, turn on or off something, and write an analog value to. The below table shows the needed information to create these properties.

Property	Type	Value Range	Permission
dimmer	int	0 - 255	Read Only (RO)
sensor_data	int	0 - 1023	Read Only (RO)
power_switch	BOOLEAN	n/a	Read & Write (RW)

Creating a property is super-easy, all we have to do is:

Name it,
Select a data type,
Set value range,
Choose permission, and..
Click the ADD button!

And this is how it looks like in the property list once they have been created:

Dashboards and widgets

Dashboards are the center of attention in the cloud! It is here we build our very own control panels to monitor and control our devices. We can build a unique dashboard for a unique thing, but we also have the possibility of monitoring several different things in the same dashboard. If we for example have five active devices, each linked to a thing, we can create one dashboard to rule them all!

But what is probably most valuable inside the dashboards are the different widgets that we create. There are over 15 different widgets that we can use to represent the properties we create. Here, we can choose from gauges, switches, RGB controls, maps, sliders and much more, to create powerful dashboards.

Take at a look at this dashboard. The widgets are directly linked to the properties mentioned earlier.

Arduino IoT Cloud Events

The Arduino IoT Cloud becomes aware of events when it receives application messages that indicate something has happened. For example, it might be informed by a face-recognition application that someone is at a door, or it has received a request from another app that light has to be turned on.

Software for Arduino IoT Cloud

Arduino boards usually require you to program them, to enter some code by way of an Arduino Sketch. The Arduino IoT Cloud will quickly and automatically generate a Sketch when setting up a new thing: this is one of its convenient features.

Take a look at the example below to see a sketch that was automatically generated from setting up the IoT Cloud:

Arduino IoT Cloud allows other methods of interaction, including HTTP REST API, MQTT, Command-Line Tools, Javascript, and Websockets. It’s a very versatile system. For more details, check out the API documentation.

Security

We at Arduino take cyber-security very seriously. All of our cloud-compatible boards come with the ECC-508 crypto-chip, ensuring that all data transferred and stored in the cloud are secure. We do however support some third party boards that are not equipped with the ECC-508 crypto chip.

Sketches generated from the cloud also automatically generate an additional header file, with an easy-to-use interface to enter your network credentials!

Tutorials and Articles

You can find a lot more inspiration to get started with the cloud in the articles below: