A couple of weeks ago, our CEO Gary had a new heating system fitted, with the new tado° smart thermostat. It’s pretty impressive, carefully reducing the temperature to an optimal level as soon as the last person has left home and calculating how to pre-warm the home most efficiently for your return. It also monitors the weather and claims to cut overall heating costs by 31%. Even more interestingly, tado° announced earlier this year an open API. This got us thinking.
Our developers are not known for their ability to focus on the mundane when a new bit of kit is available in the office, so true to form a couple of them dropped what they were doing and started hunting the web for details on how to access the API. A little bit of fiddling about at the backend and they had it hooked up to DataPA OpenAnalytics. Now we can all keep an eye on the temperature of Gary’s house online and via the DataPA OpenAnalytics mobile app (take a look).
This is all very entertaining, but does illustrate a more useful point. The combination of IOT devices and analytics is set to change our world in many unexpected ways. An analytics tool like DataPA OpenAnalytics will quite happily accumulate data from these devices, display it in any imaginable format and on any device, and raise alerts should any interesting threshold be met. For Gary, he can keep track of his heating system, and receive an alert should the temperature reach a value that indicates an issue. With a few more IOT devices in the home, he could combine that with information on his fuel consumption and the cost of heating fuel. Surely this will offer opportunities to further improve the efficiency of heating his home, perhaps in months to come a few companies offering a monitoring and tuning service?
It’s clear these devices and modern analytics tools are opening up a world of opportunity for new innovation. Our errant developers have now been tasked with building an interface to make it simple for anyone to hook up DataPA OpenAnalytics to these devices and services without having to tinker with the back end. We can’t wait to see where this leads us.
If this is the first you’ve heard about DataPA OpenAnalytics, why not find out more at datapa.com.