Adafruit IO is a platform designed by Adafruit to display, respond, and interact with your project's data. Adafruit keeps your data private (data feeds are private by default) and secure (we will never sell or give this data away to another company) for you. It's the internet of things - for everyone!
If you do not already have an Adafruit IO account set up, head over to io.adafruit.com to link your Adafruit.com account to Adafruit IO.
Create Feeds
Feeds are the core of the Adafruit IO system. The feed holds metadata about the data you push to Adafruit IO. We'll be creating two feeds - temperature and moisture.
- Navigate to the Adafruit IO feeds page.
- Click Actions. From the dropdown, click Create a New Feed.
Change the feed name to Temperature. We may also optionally add a description here. Click Create to create a new feed.
Then, create another feed called moisture.
Build a Dashboard
Next, we'll create a dashboard to display the values from the feeds we created.
- For a primer about Adafruit IO Dashboards, head over to the Adafruit IO Basics: Dashboards guide.
- Navigate to the Adafruit IO Dashboards page.
- From the Actions dropdown, click Create a New Dashboard.
- Name the dashboard PyPortal Pet Planter
Add a Line Chart
The STEMMA Soil Sensor provides a soil moisture reading from very dry to very wet along with an ambient temperature reading from the internal temperature sensor on the microcontroller.
From the dashboard, click the + button to create a new block.
From the modal, Click the Line Chart block.
The line chart can graph one or more feeds.
The line chart can graph one or more feeds. We'll be graphing the moisture and temperature feed values to see how they change over time.
Search for the temperature feed. Click the checkbox. Then, search for the moisture feed. Click the checkbox.
Click Next Step
Add Gauges
A gauge is a read only block type that shows a fixed range of values. We'll add two gauge blocks to the dashboard to display values from the planter in real-time.
From the feed list, select the moisture feed.
Set Block Title to Moisture.
The moisture sensor can read values up to 2000, set Gauge Max Value to 2000.
Tick the Show Icon button and set the icon to w:raindrop.
Click Save.
Let's make another gauge block to display the temperature sensor's value.
Click Create a new block.
Set the Block Title to Temperature.
Set the Gauge Label to F
We can optionally set the Low Warning Value or High Warning Value. The gauge will change color when the value is out of bounds.
Tick the Show Icon button and set the icon to w:thermometer.
Click Save.
If your account has an active Adafruit IO Plus subscription, you can optionally add a header image to customize your dashboard.
Download the image by right-clicking the button below and saving it to your computer.
Click the Edit Dashboard Layout (Green Gear) button.
Next to the dashboard's title, click Edit Settings.
Under Header Image, select the image you downloaded in the previous step.
Tick the checkbox next to Show Header Image
Click Save.
Your dashboard should look like the screenshot below.
Obtain Adafruit IO Key
You are also going to need your Adafruit IO username and secret API key.
Navigate to your profile and click the View AIO Key button to retrieve them. Write them down in a safe place, you'll need them for the next step.
Now that we've set up our Adafruit IO account, let's move on to setting up the PyPortal Titano.
