Whats the value of measuring light levels?

There are tons of different use-cases where measuring light levels is important! Lets take a look at a couple:

• Greenhouse/Agricultural production facility monitoring - Within the agriculture industry, there are literally thousands upon thousands of indoor growing operations for all sorts of different crops. Having the ability to measure the light levels and ensuring that the growing lights are still on is valuable BUT also knowing what those specific LUX levels are could help to increase yields within the industry. Specifically, think of the emergence and growth of the Cannabis industry (as many states and countries are starting to legalize it) - it is crucial to know if the growing lights are still active and if they are set at the correct levels. If they are not, knowing and getting alerted could help save a crop or increase the yield!

• Door open/closed - As a great example, putting the TrackALL into the a Freezer/Fridge (Either residential, commercial, or industrial) you could detect if the door was open due to a difference in light coming in through the open door or if the overhead light comes on. At the same time, using the other built-in sensors, you could measure humidity, temperature, etc!

• Other cools things like: When is the sun setting or rising? Monitor other lights that may be critical (What about a heat light on livestock during the winter?), use the device to alter the lights in your home or office to save energy, etc.

How the new mcThings Platform works:

With the advent and soon to be released mcCloud feature, the mcThings platform now provides the ability to connect to devices remotely, from anywhere in the world and within range of an mcGateway, so that you can easily debug and make programming changes to the application on your mcThings device. New mcOS (device firmware) is also updated OTA through mcCloud and the mcGateway.

After writing a programming script within mcStudio and uploading it to your mcCloud security domain, you can then deploy applications to your devices easily from anywhere. Information incoming from your devices travels either to Sigfox (and on to the cloud) or to an mcGateway over mcAir (a LPLAN) which are forwarded, through integrations that you setup within your security domain, to any type of application that can receive webhooks (HTTPS). You can even send the same information to multiple different applications like Microsoft Azure, Ubidots, AWS, Losant, etc. Check out this visual:

How the mcThings platform works

Viewing the data in Ubidots!

If you haven't heard of Ubidots, you should check them out. Their IoT cloud dashboard application is awesome and easy to use. We sent the LUX levels to their dashboard using Sigfox (you can also do this using mcAir). Learn more about connecting devices to Ubidots through their awesome documentation.

Visualizing LUX levels on Ubidots

Ubidots also allows you to setup alerts, events, and even reports:

You can schedule reports to go out on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule!

Using the new Ubidots events engine, that can handle complex and conditional logic, you easily setup alerts based on the conditions of your variables and then send emails, SMS, etc. As an example, the below trigger is setup to alert if the LUX value goes above or below a threshold for 5 minutes, indicating there is an issue.

Setting up triggers in Ubidots

Thanks for reading! Check out the TrackALL on Kickstarter now and be among the first to use this awesome new IoT device!