20140620 XOBXOB.com Internet of Things Demo

My 2nd project this week is another Internet of Things of Demo, This one is using a service called XOBXOB.com - which is BOXBOX backwards. XOBXOB appears to be a new player in the realm of IoT, and hasn’t official published it’s API yet.

XOBXOB is very easy to use if you want to send information to your Arduino, I found it a lot more frustrating to get information back from the Arduino.

The creator of this service has setup XOBs (or Boxes) - which always contain a string. OK so far so good. And in the library he does provide away to update your XOB - I couldn’t get it to work however using the DS1620 (I’m not sure, the Skynet sketches running on a mega where giving the wrong temperatures, not sure if the DS1620 library was written for the UNO or if the MEGA is faster, or what, but the value was wrong, not a big deal for what I am doing as most of this is just prove of concept anyways.) But in the XOBXOB sketch I wasn’t getting anything close to what was expected, and nothing showed up on the website. Again, don’t know if I was doing something funny or if it’s a problem with the DS1620 library or XOBXOB libraries.

So I’m probably going to borrow one of the other tempature sensors and see if I can get that to work with XOB.

BUT Using some very simple API calls (I asked the creator, and he gave me a brief listing of the API calls), you can send anything to the Arduino, it comes in as a string so if you need to do anything to it, you have to convert. BUT it’s super simple to send information to it.

He provides two sketches one is a simple blink (send it a ON command) and the LED lights up, send it anything else and it turns off. and a Moving Message Matrix sketch, this is one of the best sketches I’ve seen, ok, I like my moving message matrixes, but with this I can send anything from the command line or from the XOB website and it will display the text.

Bottom line at least so far with XOB is if you need to send data to the Arduino this works great. IF you need to get data from the Arduino there are better services that are much easier to use to get the job done.