New Articles:

February 8, 2021

4DML Case Study

Building management has become a necessity for business owners. Where to start and how to do it gets complicated. 4D Monitoring offers a solution ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

November 13, 2020

Input Controls

Being able to control things directly from a Tiles dashboard has been one of the most requested Initial State user features. You now have the option to add ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

October 12, 2020

How to Build a Plug-In Pi Zero Display and Show Something Useful

I wanted to create a simple, compact display driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero that plugs into a power ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

October 6, 2020

Initial State Read API

Initial State has always had an incredibly easy-to-use API for streaming data into your account. What has been missing is a similar API for reading data out of ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

September 23, 2020

How to Use a Soil Moisture Sensor to Keep Your Plants Alive

Every good plant mom (or dad) knows there are two important things to keep your indoor plants ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

September 3, 2020

How to Build a Raspberry Pi Refrigerator/Freezer Monitor

This tutorial will tell you exactly how to build a smart freezer thermometer — fully monitored, reliable ... Read more

Rick Kuhlman

August 24, 2020

Logging and Supervising Your Remote Temperature Monitor

What if one of your wireless sensors goes offline without you knowing? That’s where Initial State’s new ... Read more

Rachel-Chloe Gregory

August 6, 2020

How to Monitor Your Boat During the Winter

This is a DIY solution using a Raspberry Pi, some electronics, and Initial State to monitor your boat, so you can have all the data when you are on it ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

July 13, 2020

How to Build a Crawl Space Humidity Monitor

Nothing wreaks havoc on your crawl space like excess moisture. Learn how to remotely monitor crawl space humidity w/ dashboards & alerts ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

June 18, 2020

Build a Weather Dashboard that sends alerts using a Weather Data API

Being a Tornado Survivor, I use many ways to get weather alerts. I made a weather dashboard that can ... Read more

Jeff Loucks

May 24, 2020

How to Create a Tesla Geofence

This tutorial will show you how to create a Tesla geofence to automatically send a SMS text from your Model 3/S/X when you get close to a location ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

May 12, 2020

ESP32 Temperature Monitor

This article will walk through how to monitor temperature with an ESP32 and DHT22 sensor using Arduino IDE and Initial State ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

April 15, 2020

Build a Tesla Data Dashboard with the Tesla API

This tutorial will show you how you can connect your Tesla to Initial State for historical data storage and real-time alerts including geofence alerts ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

April 7, 2020

Integration Marketplace

Initial State has launched its newest feature, Integration Marketplace. The codeless data integrations allow users to get data from APIs with just a few clicks ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

February 26, 2020

OwnBooth - WeWork Phone Booth Occupancy

This project is a prototype IoT occupancy sensor that shows whether phone booths are available for use before trekking across the building ... Read more

Rick Kuhlman

February 7, 2020

Raspberry Pi Data Logger

So you have that Raspberry Pi sitting around and you are wondering what to do with it? With a seemingly infinite number of project ideas and ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

December 11, 2019

IoT Inspiration: Projects and Examples

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the way people view and interact with the world. Not only that, it’s so easy to connect your life to ... Read more

Jeff Loucks

December 5, 2019

Smart Office IoT Projects

Whether you are looking for ways to save energy, implement home automation in the office, or keep track of the environment & people, smart office IoT ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

November 19, 2019

Students Prototype Design for School Security System Using Raspberry Pi

School safety is on everyone's mind but no more so than students. Battle Ground Academy students ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

November 8, 2019

What is an IoT Dashboard?

Evaluating an IoT dashboard involves analyzing its many functional aspects including data visualizations, organization, storage, analytics, and security. Read more

Jamie Bailey

October 24, 2019

Productivity Dashboard for Devs

I talk all the time with other developers about productivity in a data-less sort way. “I felt Really productive today!” or maybe “I don’t ... Read more

Zack Koppert

October 22, 2019

Student-Run Businesses are Teaching Kids Real World Lessons

Students are getting the experience I wish I had when I was in high school and middle school. Read more

Elizabeth Adams

October 17, 2019

How to Build a Raspberry Pi Smart Beer Fridge

How do you take a perfectly good beer or wine fridge and make it smart? One way is to have the refrigerator tell you how many bottles are in it and how many ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

October 8, 2019

How to Build a Raspberry Pi Temperature Monitor

Temperature and humidity are vital data points in today’s industrial world. Monitoring environmental ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

October 7, 2019

Data Design: Inspiration vs Information

There are so many articles, books, and other resources online that will tell you the hard and fast rules of how to design a great dashboard or data ... Read more

Jeffrey Loucks

October 1, 2019

Why Pie Charts Suck But They Don’t Have To

The universal view of pie charts is that they suck. You throw one of these into your PowerPoint presentation and you better be prepared to be mocked mercilessly. Read more

Elizabeth Adams

September 12, 2019

How to Make a See-Through Transparent Web Dashboard

When I first got my iPhone. I developed a crowd-pleasing party trick to make the screen look ... Read more

Rick Kuhlman

August 15, 2019

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Data Points: Initial State Adds Unsplash Image Backgrounds

You can now add image backgrounds to your Initial State dashboards! ... Read more

Rachel-Chloe Gregory

June 12, 2019

Initial State Releases LabVIEW SDK at NI Week

NI puts on an incredible show every year, and Initial State took advantage of the opportunity to exhibit at NI Week 2019. At the show, we released a LabVIEW ... Read more

Rick Kuhlman

May 14, 2019

4 ways to stream data from Node Red to a dashboard

Node Red is a browser based programming tool that allows you to connect code blocks that accomplish ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

April 25, 2019

When healthcare doesn’t provide the solution, sometimes you have to build it yourself

This story is not my own, but it was one so compelling I wanted to share it with others. I found Max’s ... Read more

Elizabeth Adams

March 22, 2019

Build an Inexpensive Network of Web-Connected Temperature Sensors using Pi Zeros

Temperature and humidity sensors can be invaluable data collection tools when deployed in your home ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

March 11, 2019

How to Stream (Push) Data to a Real-Time Dashboard API in Python

If you are building projects in Python, there is a good chance you will want to capture some sort ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

February 28, 2019

Tuck Away a Specific Month/Week/Day/Hour View of Your Streamed Data

If you have a set of sensors or an application streaming data over a long period of time, there ... Read more

Jamie Bailey

February 20, 2019

How to Stream Your Google Sheets Data to a Real-Time Dashboard

Spreadsheets excel at (see what I did there) manipulating data in all kinds of crazy ways ... Read more

Jamie Bailey