Let's have a look at some Internet of Things services that we can make use of.

Over on the browser I've opened up the web page for a website called IFTTT which stands for if this then that I'm just going to refer to it as ift for now. Ift links services together so if an event is detected on one service, IFFT will create an action on another. Let's take a closer look, if we scroll down we can go to their discover section and I'll just open up this applets we love example here. So this is a collection of pre-made examples that we can use and we can see the very first applet is tweet your instagrams as Native photos on Twitter and down the bottom, if you do a hover over, you can see that this works with Twitter, so that's kind of like what this integrates with the services these integrate with and because it was created by Instagram of course it's integrated with Instagram so it sounds like what that applet is going to do is whenever a new Instagram post is detected that raw photo is picked and then posted as a tweet on Twitter so you can see we're linking Instagram and Twitter to services with IFFT. Perhaps another quick example we have, Always be prepared for the weather by Weather Underground and we can see that that integrates with email calendar and notifications so that sounds like it's going to be some kind of rain alert and if we open it up we can see you'll get a mobile notification and a bunch of other stuff like email and calendar events whenever rain is forecast so that's pretty cool you know a nice umbrella reminder as you're leaving in the morning perhaps you know you could open this up and customize it so you don't get quite as much information maybe you want to ditch the email and the Calender event, maybe you just want the notification but that's IFFT and that's a really useful tool for linking services.

Continuing on we have Particle, now Particle are an IoT company that produce web connected hardware, if you've heard of Arduino's particle create essentially web connected Arduinos and that's really neat because they've also very recently rolled in support for Raspberry Pi so now in this this IoT service called the Particle Cloud, we can interact with our own Raspberry pi what this means is we can actually program it wirelessly and have it interact with other devices on the particle cloud like the hardware particle create. so while we're here, create an account with IFFT and create an account with particle because we're going to be using them later in the chapter, if you don't already have one, create a gmail account if you've already got a gmail account and you want to keep your Internet of Things experiments and projects separate from your personal account just feel free to make a new account just for this purpose now. And then briefly we also have a few services offered by SparkFun and Adafruit sparkfun run a free data server called data.sparkfun.com and this is where you can push data to be stored and then displayed, so if you have say a temperature and humidity sensor on your Raspberry Pi you can push that telemetry data on that weather station data to this and have it stored for you and something is similar similar is true with Adafruit as well Adafruit have a data server called Adafruit.io and this works off a publish and subscribe scheme called MQTT. So MQTT is a really useful protocol for machines to communicate with each other and you'll probably find that MQTT is behind a lot of the services that we've talked about already, MQTT works by publishers and subscriptions, so a publisher will publish data to some topic and that data gets stored on a web server, and that web server looks at the data and also whoever is subscribed to that topic and will push the data to the subscribers, so publishers publish to a topic, and any subscribers to that topic get delivered the data so those are that's just a quick rundown of a few services that we're going to look at remember to create those accounts with IFFT, Particle and Gmail and we'll get using them in the next video