Connecting Your Robot to MyRobots / ThingSpeak

By RobotGrrl
Category: Computers & Mobile
Time Required: 30 to 90 minutes
Difficulty: Moderate

Time to let RoboBrrd soar into the clouds! OK, maybe metaphorically speaking. In this guide you will be able to connect any Arduino-compatible robot with MyRobots and update its sensor data!

We will be using an Arduino and Processing to send your robot’s data to MyRobots. The data will be transferred through the USB cable via a serial connection, so your robot won’t need an onboard Internet connection.

The same process in this guide will work fine on any configuration of Arduino-compatible robots; you will just have to tweak what pins and what data to your specific needs.

To complete this guide you will need an:

Internet connection
Account on MyRobots
Arduino (and preferably a robot)

Here are the resources we will use:

You can look at all the code for this guide on Github:

With that said, let’s get started!

Steps

Step #1:

First, create a robot on MyRobots.
You can customize your robot/channel with your robot's information
Go to Manage Robots, and then to your robot.
Grab the API Key on the robot's information.

Conclusion

There are many more interesting things that you can do with MyRobots and the ThingSpeak platform. You can read more about it on their documentation here and here!

Add on more features and capabilities, this guide was meant as a stepping stone to help get the connection started!

This tutorial is part of my fundraising effort for travel expenses to go to Maker Faire Bay Area! I'm trying to answer the question: "How many MAKE Projects does it take to get to Maker Faire?" So if you like this tutorial, you can donate towards my travel expenses here! Thanks for checking it out!

If you enjoyed this tutorial, you can visit my website where I am up to all sorts of shenanigans!

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CREDITS

Arduino

RoboBrrd

Cloud image

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