Sign up to the Datacake IOT Platform and Add an IOT Device

There have been a lot of Internet of Things (IOT) project ideas coming in lately and I have been using the Datacake as my preferred IOT prototyping platform. It is so quick to setup new IOT devices and the Datacake dashboards look great. Best of all, you can add 2 devices for free and don't need to register your credit card on signup.

In this post I am going to visually guide you through signing up to the website and adding your first IOT device. Lets go!

Get Started with Datacake

Step 1: Navigate to https://app.datacake.de/signup and fill in the webform with your account details.

Step 2: Go to the Devices menu and click on the Add Device button.

Step 3: Select the API device type (for MQTT and/or HTTPS connections).

Step 4: Select New Product and make a name for the IOT device you will be connecting.

Step 5: Now enter the Serial Number for your device. It needs to be a globally unique ID so I usually use the EUI that is provided with most LoRaWAN devices.

Step 6: You can have up to 2 free HTTP devices before you need to start paying - MQTT devices must be on a paid plan. Choose the Free option for the moment. You are able to change the plan type for each IOT device at any time. Click the Add 1 Device button.

Step 7: Now your device is added, click on it to get to the configuration details

Step 8: In the configuration tab you will find HTTP Payload Decoder. In this section there is a HTTP Endpoint URL. This is the url that is to be used to send data to Datacake via an HTTPS webhook. Click the Copy button and save the URL for device configuration (beyond the scope of this post)

Congratulations, you have now defined your first IOT device to the Datacake IOT Platform!

If you now send data to the HTTP Endpoint URL from step 8, you can see the data being recieved by Datacake, by clicking on the Show Logs button in the HTTP Paylod Decoder section. At this point you can start analysing your IOT data payloads and start constructing a decoder.

This is an example of data I have coming in from a Seeed Studio SenseCAP S2100 Data Logger:

See the very well written Datacake Docs for more information on how to prepare a payload decoder.

If you have found this helpful or have been using the Datacake IOT platform yourself for IOT prototyping, please reach out to me and let me know about your project.