I was reviewing a couple of my pages after changing my House Controller to a Raspberry Pi, and noticed that one of my charts was several hours behind the current readings. Then I noticed that the chart that I present on my House Controller was presenting yesterdays readings. After about three hours of chasing problems, it turned out that the Xively server is caching pages.
Yes, I'm trying to get the latest data I uploaded and the server is returning me the data from hours or even days ago because it sees the request hasn't changed and simply returns what it has in its cache. No, I wasn't changing the request I sent; it was a request for the latest data. Why would I change a request that asked for the latest?
What I had to do to overcome the problem was to get the date and time and ask for data that ended with the current time instead. This made the request change each time I sent it and the server had to read the data to fulfill the request. This explains a lot of the problems mentioned on StackOverflow that I read while trying to get my own stuff to work. Additionally, I wanted to step through Xively's process of 'Deploy' and couldn't. Seems the device itself has to have code on it to activate itself. There's no support for this in their library and I really didn't want to spend hours going through the debugging process that I would incur to try and meet their API. They could have simply put in a single unit deployment process on their web site so that little guys like me could step through it.
Their rates are huge, a grand being the lowest level with transaction costs on top of that; a far cry from the 10 bucks or so a month that pachube had back in the good old days before some faceless corporation bought them out. So, let's list a few things that I've noticed. They preserved the legacy feeds that we've been using, but provide no reasonable way of moving them to the new system. They cache data so we're very likely to get data back that is days old. They have no way to deploy a device in their new system without the device itself doing the work. They took away their forum for exchanging ideas, instead they expect us to post on StackOverflow which is specifically designed for problems. They even removed the forum so that the old ideas and techniques have disappeared. Yet, they post on Twitter that they are attending shows, giving speeches, and publishing articles on the prevalence of the Internet of Things.
Does anyone actually like this service since the latest change? Am I the only one that has seen a steady decline since the original developers presented this cool new tool that us home automation and control freaks went nuts over?
Sad.
Yes, I'm trying to get the latest data I uploaded and the server is returning me the data from hours or even days ago because it sees the request hasn't changed and simply returns what it has in its cache. No, I wasn't changing the request I sent; it was a request for the latest data. Why would I change a request that asked for the latest?
What I had to do to overcome the problem was to get the date and time and ask for data that ended with the current time instead. This made the request change each time I sent it and the server had to read the data to fulfill the request. This explains a lot of the problems mentioned on StackOverflow that I read while trying to get my own stuff to work. Additionally, I wanted to step through Xively's process of 'Deploy' and couldn't. Seems the device itself has to have code on it to activate itself. There's no support for this in their library and I really didn't want to spend hours going through the debugging process that I would incur to try and meet their API. They could have simply put in a single unit deployment process on their web site so that little guys like me could step through it.
Their rates are huge, a grand being the lowest level with transaction costs on top of that; a far cry from the 10 bucks or so a month that pachube had back in the good old days before some faceless corporation bought them out. So, let's list a few things that I've noticed. They preserved the legacy feeds that we've been using, but provide no reasonable way of moving them to the new system. They cache data so we're very likely to get data back that is days old. They have no way to deploy a device in their new system without the device itself doing the work. They took away their forum for exchanging ideas, instead they expect us to post on StackOverflow which is specifically designed for problems. They even removed the forum so that the old ideas and techniques have disappeared. Yet, they post on Twitter that they are attending shows, giving speeches, and publishing articles on the prevalence of the Internet of Things.
Does anyone actually like this service since the latest change? Am I the only one that has seen a steady decline since the original developers presented this cool new tool that us home automation and control freaks went nuts over?
Sad.