Connected Devices

Welcome to the Connected Devices walkthrough. As you read through and try out the example API requests, you will be introduced to the basics of using the EVRYTHNG Platform in the connected devices context. You will learn about:

• Projects and applications, which are used to scope resources.
• Products and Thngs, which are the core data storage resources the Platform.
• Properties and actions, which model data update events.
• Limiting access to data with roles and visualising it through widget dashboards.

This API walkthrough will be themed around a simple connected devices scenario - a remote weather station IoT device. We will model the data and interactions such a device would make through the Platform.

All of the examples here use curl, a standard Mac/Linux terminal program used to make web requests. You will be able to simply paste the examples into your Mac or Linux terminal and immediately see the results. In some cases you will need to replace a placeholder with a real value obtained from previous steps, but we will guide you through this as each case arises. In most cases, you will need to replace $OPERATOR_API_KEY in the example with your own. See below on how to obtain this key.

## Preparing an Account

In order to use the EVRYTHNG Platform and use these examples, you need to create a free account and obtain an Operator API Key. One of several types of API key, the Operator API Key allows an app to make requests on behalf of an account holder, and has the highest privileges.

To begin, create an EVRYTHNG Dashboard account and log in. The Dashboard allows you to visually interact will all the resources in your account, and is good for performing small-scale tasks. In addition to managing resources, you can also set up and use widget dashboards to gain insights into the data in your account. But for the purposes of this API walkthrough, we will only require the Operator API Key to begin with.

Choose the Account Settings page using the top-right menu, which displays the Operator API Key. Make a note of this key before moving on to the next section.

## Using the Examples

To make use of the code examples shown throughout this walkthrough as simple as possible, we recommend you export your Operator API Key at the start of your terminal session. This will save you needing to insert it into every request. For example, in your user profile (such as .bash_profile or similar), or in the terminal itself:

export OPERATOR_API_KEY="1FGqgM8xr13ggAy9lukS4HEwKolgWdP1x6On06vrDCGXhYFmCVa4..."

As more types of API key are introduced, export these as well using the specified names in the examples that require them. For example, $APPLICATION_USER_API_KEY for the Application User API Key, once you create one.