Introduction

theThings.iO platform provides a complete backend solution for IoT Markers and IoT App Developers through an easy and flexible API. theThings.iO is hardware agnostic. This means that we don't force you to use a specific hardware, provided that it is capable to use any of our supported protocols: HTTP, Websockets, MQTT or CoAP.

We will work with thethings.iO API REST, so you'll only need a system with curl installed to follow this overview.

Step 0 - Create your thethings.iO account

Fill in the form on the Sign Up Page. Once done, you'll be signed in to your panel automatically. There are a couple of restrictions:

Create Account

You need a valid e-mail.
The password has to be at least 6 characters long.

Step 1 - Planning the Thing

Before typing any code, probably, you already have an idea and sketches of what do you want to connect to the Internet.

You will need to think about what data do you need to store, visualize and query. For example, if you are prototyping a thermostat, you can think about this data:

temperature
outdoor temperature
target temperature
humidity
outdoor humidity
status

Step 2 - Setup Your First Product

To start connecting your hardware, first you need to set up your product in the platform.

We will go to the products list to create it.
Click on 'Create New Product'.

Fill out the following form. Put a name, a board and a description if you want. Leave the rest as it is.

When you see the following form with the example code your first thing is already activated!

If you want to activate more things, activation codes are needed to activate your things at thethings.iO. When you activate them, you will get a token. This token will enable you to make API calls to thethings.iO from your thing.

You already received your token in the window with the example code that we saw before. If you did not copy your token let's do that now:

Go to the Things Manager
Click on your product
Go to the device list and click at the details button.
Then the first section contains the name, thingId and thingToken of your device. Copy your Thing Token.

From now on, all the requests will be done using your thing token.

Step 3 - Code your Thing

Now, your thing can perform 3 types of actions:

Read: Reads the last values for a certain key.
Write: Store one or several key-values pairs.
Subscribe: Subscribes to the real-time streaming channel of your things.

First, you can open the Developers console to visualize the messages that you will post to thethings.iO APIs.

Write

Writes the records of data from the thing to the specified THINGTOKEN. Only alphanumeric characters and ".", "-", "" symbols are admitted for the resource name "key".

POST https://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN

📘
Remember to replace THING_TOKEN with the thing token that you got when you activated your thing.

curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "values": [ { "key": "fun", "value": "5000" } ] }' \
-X POST "https://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN" -k

# Store a value
{
  "values": [
    {
      "key": "fun",
      "value": "5000"
    }
  ]
}

# Store a set of values
{
  "values": [
    {
      "key": "fun",
      "value": "5000"
    },
    {
      "key": "temperature",
      "value": "23"
    },
    {
      "key": "humidity",
      "value": "60"
    }
  ]
}

# Everything has gone well
{"status":"success","message":"created"}

# If you get this error, remember to change THING_TOKEN for a valid thing token.
{"status": "error", "message": "Thing token doesn't exist"}

Read

This method returns the values of the resource with the specified KEY from the corresponding THING_TOKEN. To read data, use the operation GET /things/ with the Thing Token and the KEY that you are using to store the values.

GET https ://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN/resources/KEY

📘
Remember to replace THING_TOKEN with the thing token that you got when you activated your thing and KEY with the name of the resource that you want to read. KEY examples: temperature, humidity, status, ...

curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" \
-X GET "https://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN/resources/KEY?limit=10" -k

# Everything has gone well
[ {"value": "9000", "datetime": "2015-01-30T15:35:33.000Z" } ]

# If you get this error, remember to change THING_TOKEN for a valid thing token.
{"status": "error", "message": "Thing token doesn't exist"}

# If you try to read a key(resource) which you never write before, you'll get the next error. Remember to change KEY for a valid key.
{"status": "error","message": "resource not found"}

Subscribe

The next method lets you subscribe to the thing channel and get real-time updates from all the thing's resources (keys). The subscription endpoint creates a streaming channel and we keep the channel opened depeding on the keep alive that you send. Check the API documentation to see further details on the keep alive options. If no keep alive is set, your router or our server will close the channel at its sole discretion.

To test the real-time updates, you'll need to open two consoles. One for the subscription command, and another console to do the write commands with curl as seen above.

GET https://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X GET "https://api.thethings.io/v2/things/THING_TOKEN" -N

# Everything has gone well
{"status":"success", "message":"subscribed"}

# If you get this error, remember to change THING_TOKEN for a valid thingToken.
{"status":"error", "message":"Thing with thing token 'Eyixxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx' not found."}

Step 4 - Visualize the data

In the panel you can visualize the data of your thing. To see these charts:

Go the Things Manager
Click on your product
At the thing that you want to visualize click on 'Details'.

For every key that you have stored, you can visualize various types of charts like line charts, pie charts, logs, etc. Additionally, you can see past data on the historical tab and in real-time as the data arrives on the real-time tab.

Step 5 - Explore

Continue exploring with the help of the Get Started section inside our platform. This will guide you to create your first Dashboard and navigate to other sections like the Apps Manager and the Cloud Code page.