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Example - How to connect your LabVIEW app to Timetric

What is Timetric?

(from www.timetric.com)

Timetric's here to help you make sense of data. If you think about it, most of the numbers we come across every day are things like temperatures, prices, rates, volumes: numbers which vary over time.

That's what Timetric focusses on: graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time.

The fancy name for this sort of thing is time series analysis. We're building tools to make it as easy to build models on top of time series — updated whenever the data they're based on is updated — as it is to use a spreadsheet.

But tools aren't much use without data, so we've collected together some you might be interested in, like economic, social and environmental data from sources including the United Kingdom government, the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank. (And we're adding more every day.)

timetric2.png

First of all it is not coincidence that this document is very similar to Ian Bell's "Example - How to connect your LabVIEW app to Pachube" : http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4158 . I wanted to keep the same format as both platforms (Pachube and Timetric) have got common idea.  I use Pachube for recording temperature ( http://www.pachube.com/feeds/2122 ), but the platform doesn't allow you to add any timestamp to the data (yet). So I wanted to use Timetric, since it's design for time series analysis. Here is how to use the VIs:

Functional Description


The main vi's have some useful information in their descriptions:

Timetric Update Series.vi - takes data in CSV format and updates a Timetric series (* requires API token/key)

ISO 8601 date and time.vi - returns current date and time in ISO 8601 format, author : Peter Lanc (http://shrimp.anu.edu.au/people/pl/labview.html)

How to get started

A quick summary of how to get started with the VIs and Timetric.

1. Signup with Timetric account and login: http://timetric.com/

2. Go to Timetric Settings https://timetric.com/settings/ -> Applications tab, and create new API Token (consists of a pair of strings; the key and the secret)

3. Generate encoded Base64 API Token for HTTP Basic transaction. Follow the instructions on http://timetric.com/help/authentication/

4. Go to Timetric Dashboard https://timetric.com/dashboard/ and Create a series/feed (e.g. choose option "By hand")

5. Once the series/feed is created you can get a series id from the web address : http://timetric.com/series/<series_id>/    (where <series_id> might be for example:  AuSSxAabSF6qiBuA64L_RA )

4. You can then use Timetric Update Series.vi to update the feed. You will need to wire in your API token, series id and the data in CVS format. This format is documented fully: here http://timetric.com/help/httpapi/ . In brief:

    * you need one CSV file for each individual series
    * each CSV file must have two columns
    * the first column represents the time axis, and should be in either ISO 8601 format, or in Unix time
    * the second column represents your data, usually numerical
    * e.g. 2009-07-18T23:26:20,18.78

The VIs are written in LabVIEW 8.2 and were tested only on WinXP.

If you test the vi's on other platforms - please add to this document to let the community know.

Contributors