Welcome to Pachube

Pachube is a data brokerage platform for the internet of things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals, organisations & companies around the world. It enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world.

Apart from enabling direct connections between any two devices, objects or environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any things to "plug-in" to other things 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's scalable infrastructure helps you...

• Manage realtime sensor & environment data:
  Pachube is a data brokerage platform for the internet of things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals, organisations & companies around the world. Convenient, secure & economical, Pachube stores, converts & serves data in multiple data formats, which makes it interoperable with both established web protocols & existing construction industry standards. All feeds include contextual metadata (timestamps, geolocation, units, tags) that actually make datastreams valuable.
• Graph, monitor & control remote environments:
  Embed realtime graphs & widgets in your own website. Analyse & process historical data pulled from any public Pachube feed. Send realtime alerts from any datastream to control your own scripts, devices & environments. Out-of-the-box configurable tools include a zoomable graph, a mapping/tracking widget, an augmented reality viewer, SMS alerts & apps for various smartphones. As soon as something is plugged into Pachube, you're ready to monitor & control it.
• Build mobile & web apps that create value:
  With a rapid development cycle & dozens of code examples & libraries, Pachube's simple yet sophisticated 'physical-to-virtual' API makes it quick & easy to build applications that add value to networked objects & environments. That's because real value-creation comes from the applications that are built on top of sensor systems. Pachube handles the scalability & high-availability required for complex data management, so that you are empowered to develop applications that make decision-making more sophisticated.
• Share data & create communities:
  Pachube is built to encourage open ecosystems. Connect electricity meters, weather stations, building management systems, air quality monitors, biosensors, geiger counters — build communities around devices & data collection. While privacy options will soon be available, Pachube's unique openness promotes growth: most hardware & software libraries & real world applications are being created by its community!

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/ (main website)
- 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.