Adafruit.io

I've got a hacked together temperature sensor in my son's room, built around an ESP8266 microcontroller, feeding data to Adafruit's IO service. Once a minute it checks the current temperature and then pushes it to a data feed.

That's all very well, but now I need a way to get that data back out and check he's not going to be too warm in the night. Previously my wife and I had to go to the ridiculous effort of taking our phone out of our pocket, opening a web page, and then reading the number from the screen. With our eyes.

Thanks to Alexa such labour is behind us! All we have to do is ask - "Alexa, ask Adafruit for the temperature in Arthur's room", and like the obliging servant she is she'll go through all that effort for us, and then pipe back "The temperature in Arthur's room is currently 18.38 degrees". What more could you ask for?

Well, how about the ability to query for the latest data point from any other feed as well? Sure! Why not? Alexa can give you the latest data from any feed you've got in your Adafruit.io account - its really just up to you to push something interesting. Rainfall, seismic activity, radiation levels, light levels, cups of coffee drunk in the last hour, people currently orbiting the Earth, the limit really is your imagination (and, you know, it being something that can be numerically counted).