We're an Internet of Things Development Platform helping thousands of IoT Entrepreneurs, System Integrators, and Businesses launch and scale their IoT projects without having to hire a software team.

Ubidots provides 3 tiers to power your IoT Development cycle:

• Ubidots STEM: A free tier for makers, students, researchers, and hobbysts learning about the possibilities of IoT.

• Ubidots Cloud: Our main deployment, offered under the traditional SaaS model (Software as a Service). See public pricing.

• Ubidots Enterprise: For customers requiring dedicated support, service levels, and/or support for large volumes of devices or data.

  • Optional: Ubidots Private Cloud deployment

IoT Development can be hard, but we want to make it as easy as it can get.

We know this is not an easy undertaking, specially because there are so many layers involved in an IoT project (from hardware to cloud), and we can only act in the last one: the Application layer. This being said, we do place lots of heart in understanding the entire IoT development process, and we hope these guides serve as a way to aid that process.

These guides are categorized as follows:

• Integration guides: A compilation of tutorials, libraries and examples on how to connect various devices, gateways and 3rd-part services to Ubidots.

• UbiFunctions: Our serverless environment has grown from a custom decoding tool, to an integration and analytics powerhouse. It deserved a chapter on its own.

• Dashboards: Our drag-n-drop IoT dashboards are often called "codeless", but this doesn't mean they don't support a good degree of customization. Check these guides to learn how to extend the power of Ubidots dashboards.

Can you provide the hardware for my project?

We are a hardware-agnostic cloud, and do not sell any hardware.

We do work with hardware companies as partners in order to test how their hardware integrates with our cloud, but this does not imply a distribution partnership.

Do you provide Integration Services?

Ubidots does not provide System Integration services. In most cases, our licenses enable projects that are deployed by either a specialized SI (System Integrator), or a customer with internal integration capabilities.

However, if your project requires Professional Services other than hardware integration, then the Ubidots team - together with an Ubidots Enterprise license - might be a good fit.

Here some areas where our team can help:

• Integration of 3rd-party APIs and databases with Ubidots.

• Integration with your Security Provider, for Single Sign On (SSO) purposes.

• Integration of Ubidots dashboards or widgets into your Web or Mobile application.

• Development of key features to enable your use case.

I would like to become a Distributor

By default, our business model is to enable beautiful IoT dashboards, but you can take all the credit!

This means that, in most cases, there's no need to become an Ubidots Distributor in order to use our tools and serve clients in your geography.

This diagram better explains how to use our platform, under a white-label model:

This approach is quite powerful because it enables you to offer a platform as if it were your own. Such offering, together with your value added services, allows you to determine your own mark up based on the particularities of your market and region. Such mark up is usually bigger than a distributor discount.

If the above model still doesn't work for you, a distribution agreement makes sense when at least one of the following is true:

• The partner needs to act as an official Ubidots distributor in front of their clients. This is the case for some public tender opportunities.

• The partner wishes to transfer all the admin capabilities of an Ubidots account to the end customer.

• The partner realizes value-added services that are not bundled into an Ubidots license (i.e. Consulting companies), so it is not in his interest to bundle the cost of the platform into an entire solution.

The main entities in Ubidots are:

• Devices

• Variables

• Dots

Every time an Ubidots Device receives a sensor value in a variable, a data-point or "dot" is created. Ubidots stores dots that come from your devices inside variables, and these stored dots have corresponding timestamps:

The Dot

Each dot contains these items:

You can find further details below.

Values

A numerical value. Ubidots accepts up to 16 floating-point length numbers.

{"value" : 34.87654974}

Timestamps

A timestamp, as best described here, is a way to track time as a running total of seconds. This count starts at the Unix Epoch on January 1st, 1970 at UTC. Therefore, the unix time stamp is merely the number of seconds between a particular date and the Unix Epoch.

But why did we choose to have a timestamp in milliseconds? This is not only a common practice in APIs, it also allows us to support many IoT applications where several datapoints are send in the same second.

"timestamp" : 1537453824000

The above timestamp corresponds to Thursday, September 20, 2018 2:30:24 PM.

Context

Numerical values are not the only data type supported; you can also store string or char data types inside what we call context. The context is a key-value object that allows you to store not only numerical but also string values. An example use of the context could be:

"context" : {"status" : "on", "weather" : "sunny"}

A context is commonly used to store the latitude and longitude coordinates of your device for GPS/tracking application use cases. All Ubidots maps uses the lat and lng keys from a dot's context to extract the coordinates of your device, in that way you just need to send a single dot with the coordinates values in the variable context to plot a map instead of sending separately both latitude and longitude in two different variables. Below you can find a typical context with coordinates values:

"context" : {"lat":-6.2, "lng":75.4, "weather" : "sunny"}

Please note that you can mix both string and numerical values in the context. If your application is for geo-localization purposes, make sure that the coordinates are set in decimal degrees.

How to send data to Ubidots?

Ubidots accepts HTTP, MQTT, TCP and UDP payloads. To learn how to send data using each one of these protocols, please refer to our Data API documentation.

Can I control a device using Ubidots?

In theory, you can program a device to act based on changes of an Ubidots variable. This could be done by either polling the cloud at periodic time intervals, or by subscribing to a variable using MQTT.

In practice, we only recommend using downlink commands to push configurations to remote devices, or better said, to perform "Virtual controls". The problem with physical controls is that, even though they are technically possible, they pose a huge risk when communication fails.

See some examples of Virtual vs Physical controls:

AWS IoT Core

AWS S3

ADAM-6717

ECU-1051

WISE-4012E

Fatbox G3

TR321 Router

Syrus 4G

TA120

KEPServerEX

Azimut Gateway

MAXI

Balena Tutorials

BalenaBlocks

Revolution Pi Core 3

ALTA Devices

Conduit

mDot

Tutorials

NCD IoT Edge Computer

NCD IoT Sensors

Predictive Maintenance Sensor

Vibration Temperature Sensor

Kontrolog

R1520 router

SIMATIC IOT2040

SS10680 IoT Gateway

Wireless smart valve

PFC200

cMT2078X

LYNX

Digi XBee Cellular 3G

Hologram Platform

Nova

IoT/M2M Connectivity Network

Notecard

Automation IoT gateway

Particle Tutorials

Quectel Tutorials

FC41D

Chirpstack Server

Helium Tutorials

DL-LP8P

ioTracker

AM107

UG65

Siconia

WisNode TrackIt

WisGate Edge Lite 2

RAK7204

SenseCap S210X

SenseCap A1101

SenseCap S2100

SenseCAP S2120 8-in-1 weather station

SenseCAP T1000

Wio Terminal

LoRa-E5

The Things Stack

Senet Portal

The Things Stack

TTS Tutorials

The Things Network

TTN Tutorials

Uplinks

Downlinks

Sigfox Tutorials

Sigfox 0G

Sens'it

Oyster

Useful Tutorials

mcDemo205

LW001-BG Pro

ST730

UnaSense

UnaProtect

UnaMotion

UnaBeacon

UnaBell

Swarm Hive

Ethernet FeatherWing

Feather HUZZAH ESP8266

FONA MiniGSM

CC3000

WISE-4012E

Arduino UNO + Ethernet Shield

Arduino UNO + WIZnet WizFi250

Arduino UNO + GSM Shield

Arduino MKR WIFI 1010

Arduino Nano 33 IoT

Arduino Yún

Arduino Tutorials

XLR8

Snō

WiDo

Notecard

Sparrow

Imp006

impExplorer

MS14N-S

mcModule

mcGateway

WCM Development Kit 1

Omega2

ESP32

ESP32 Tutorials

ESP8266 (NodeMCU)

ESP8266

Useful tutorials

Electron

Particle devices (webhook, MQTT, HTTP, TCP, UDP)

SiPy

Pytrack

FiPy

LoPy

SenseCAP K1100

Wio Terminal

BeagleBone Green Wireless

WisBlocks

ONE V3

Autonomo

Useful Tutorials

LTE Discovery pack (P-L496G-CELL01)

LTE Discovery pack (P-L496G-CELL02)

B-L072Z-LRWAN1

Nucleo-64

Xkit

Goblin 2

SimpleLink CC3200 LaunchPad

WS-2902

WS-0262A

Gambit - MQTT Lab Simulator

MIMIC Simulator

Introduction:

Ubidots offers off-the-shelf widgets to cover most visualization needs. However, some projects may require more specific and custom widgets. That's why we offer the HTML Canvas widget, which supports your own code to deliver custom visualizations.

Definition:

HTML Canvas is a widget that enables the creation of custom widgets. It accomplishes this by letting the user write their own custom code using the following languages (as well as some Ubidots' built-in methods and third-party libraries which will be described later):

• HTML

• CSS

• JavaScript

This widget features a code editor composed of three tabs, one for each language.

When to use the HTML Canvas?

Whenever the other available widgets don't meet a specific requirement in terms of functionality and/or style.

How to create an HTML Canvas?

Go to a dashboard, click the Add new widget button (+), scroll down to the Advanced section and select HTML Canvas.

Widget settings:

The widget offers the following settings:

• Code editor

• 3rd party libraries

• Enable lazy loading

• Preload Dashboard data

Widget appearance tab:

The appearence of the widget can be further customized with these options:

• Name

• Custom Style

Custom Style:

Check the Custom Style documentation here in order to know how to customize your HTML Canvas' styles.

Blocks