Make Every Week: Temp -> Text -> Table

Texting temperature data to Twitter is fun, but more useful is sending that information to a table.

That’s what I did this week, as my wanderings into wireless data collection continue: Post the temperature and humidity from my little experiment to a table at data.sparkfun.com.

Here are the steps as things stand now:

  1. The sensor reads the data (as in my original post).
  2. The Ardunio formats a message and texts it with a Fona (wiring details here, updated code here).
  3. Instead of texting to Twitter, it now texts to a phone number I bought at Twilio for $1/month.
  4. Twilio then relays that data to my project server in the Amazon cloud as an http “POST” (deets on setting up a cloud server here).
  5. My project server parses the text message, composes a URL with the data, and hits the Sparkfun open data system with that URL (code for that is here).

This all happens in just a few seconds, every 20 minutes.