Welcome to Pachube

Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Pachube is a convenient, secure & scalable platform that helps you connect to & build the 'internet of things'.

As a generalized realtime data brokerage platform, the key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive environments, networked energy meters, virtual worlds and mobile sensor devices can all "talk" and "respond" to each other.

Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data. Through the extensive use of metadata, Pachube adds value to physical interconnectivity: it's not just about datastreams, but about the environments that make up the datastreams.

Pachube makes it simple to build applications, products and services that bridge physical and virtual worlds. With a rapid development cycle (it can take just one line of code to start prototyping), and a sophisticated development path (working with both web-protocols and data formats that are interoperable with construction industry formats) people have used Pachube to build sensor-logging systems, remote monitoring apps, integrate building management systems, develop geo-tracking systems, create mashups and networked objects and a whole host of other things. For more on what you might do see What can I use Pachube for?.

Apart from CSV and JSON, Pachube also makes use of Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), which extends the construction industry protocol IFC. An extensive RESTful API makes it possible to both serve and request data in all formats. Data can be pushed to Pachube using an HTTP PUT request (especially useful for those operating behind firewalls or with non-static URLs) or Pachube can pull data from devices that are able to serve.

There are extensive tutorials and software and hardware libraries and examples available for all sorts of platforms.

Relevant URLs:

- http://www.pachube.com/ (the home of Pachube)
- http://www.ugotrade.com/2009/01/28/pachube-patching-the-planet-interview... (interview with Pachube's founder)
- http://eeml.org/ (Extended Environments Markup Language)
- http://eeml.org/library/ (EEML library for Processing)

More about the team behind Pachube is available here.