Blog and Labs

Last Monday was a bank holiday here in the UK, and while most people were playing computer games or out socialising, our CTO, Richard, was starting to truly think with portals. After releasing a ruby wrapper for the Pachube TCP stream API, Richard decided to build a Node.js streaming TCP client for Pachube's TCP server.

Node.js is an event-driven I/O framework for server-side JavaScript, but what does this mean and what does it allow us to do? Well, it essentially allows us to open up portals between events, allowing us to listen for information, rather than asking for it via the web:

Combining this with the Pachube TCP stream API enables us to extend this to real-world devices, creating portals for data to stream through to our software. What are we doing with these portals and this data?...You'll just have to wait and see ;-)

We have of course released the code for this client via the Carbon Calculated Github account; feel free to fork, commit or comment.

We have just released a gem (Ruby plugin) which uses the new beta Pachube TCP stream using Eventmachine.

The Gem is available on the Carbon Calculated github here: https://github.com/carboncalculated/pachube-stream

Pachube allows you to manage and sensor realtime data such as electricity, and have recently partnered with CurrentCost acting as the data store for the CurrentCost web bridge.

Our gem allows a Ruby developer to access their own or publically available data streams from pachube and consume the data inside their own applications. Here at CarbonCalculated we are using the Pachube Stream gem to enable realtime monitoring of electricity, gas and water consumption and related carbon emissions across our range of products. This means there is no longer a need to import gas, electricty or water bills, simply fit a web enabled meter and add the readings from the device straight into your companies carbon footprint!

To get started with the gem, read the documentation on github and have a look at the examples here: https://github.com/carboncalculated/pachube-stream/tree/master/examples

The pachube gem is open source and therefore pull requests are very much welcome!