Feed Options

Now that your feed is running, lets see what else we can do. Adafruit is always adding new ways to use and customize your feeds.  When you select the feed, you’ll have a few options running down the right side of the screen.

First up is the Feed Info - which is sort of what you expect, you can change the human-readable name, the feed name, as well as add a description. We also have a URL reference for when you program in your devices.

Next down is Privacy - you can make feeds public or private. Public feeds aren’t writable by others, but they can see the data that goes into the feed, even if they don’t have an Adafruit IO account! 

They can view the feed webpage using any browser, or fetch the JSON data over REST from any computer. MQTT usage will require an account. Private feeds are only visible to you, and you need to be logged in to Adafruit IO.

You might want more advanced sharing, since Privacy is a bit extreme - either everyone can see it or no-one can. 

Sharing lets you share read or read-write privileges with other Adafruit IO account holders. They’ll need to have an account of course, and the feed is still owned by your account, but this means you don’t have to share API Keys with others (which you shouldn’t do!)

Feed History allows you to turn on or off data storage per feed. By default the History setting is on, which allows you to track the history of a data feed.

You may want to turn this off, especially if you have a feed that has a big data payload, like binary data, and you don’t need previous values - remember that Free accounts on Adafruit IO have a limit of 30 days of history and a limit on the total storage amount.

Next up is Notifications. This is a pretty useful feature that is missing from many services - it is common to have a way to forward messages from your feeds, but often you want the opposite - a way to know if your feed hasn’t received messages. If you’ve programmed computers or microcontrollers, this is sort of the equivalent of a watchdog timer or a supervisory circuit.

Pick a time range that is at least two times larger than your expected data interval - from 10 minutes to 1 week, and you’ll get an email to your Adafruit IO account to let you know that the feed hasn’t been updated and you should check it out.

We’ll skip Webhooks for now, and go to Disable Feed. Free accounts have a limit on the number of feeds, so after you’ve used a feed, and you’re done with it, you may want to disable it. This keeps the data available for download, but doesn’t quite delete it. Once disabled, you can’t re-enable it!

Last on the list is Licensing, which is useful if you plan on making your feeds public. You may want to set a Creative Commons license so people know your expectations for what they can do with your data. For more information about Creative Commons license types, visit https://creativecommons.org/.

This guide was first published on Mar 14, 2019. It was last updated on Mar 18, 2024.

This page (Advanced Feeds) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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