Published July 28, 2015 © CC BY

Code-Free IoT with Arduino and The Tentacle on Octoblu!

Want to control your microcontrollers in the cloud graphically, without writing any code? Welcome to the Tentacle, from Octoblu.

BeginnerFull instructions provided9,273

Code-Free IoT with Arduino and The Tentacle on Octoblu!

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Arduino Mega 2560

Any Arduino-style microcontroller will do!

Particle Photon

Of course, if you want to be our favorite, you'll use this one :)

Arduino Ethernet Shield

If your Arduino can't make it to the internet on it's own.

Arduino Wifi Shield

If you're a masochist. These things have serious limitations, and are expensive. Not recommended!

ESP2866

If you want to connect an Arduino to wifi for $5 instead of $80, this is the one to get. Unfortunately, we don't have an example sketch for it yet :(. But it should be easy to port!

Software apps and online services

Octoblu Meshblu

Story

If you want to do anything in the Internet of Things space, there's nothing easier to do it than to use Octoblu. With the recent release of our new microcontroller library The Tentacle, any Arduino-ish microcontroller can be used in our flows in a matter of minutes - without writing any custom code!

Read more about The Tentacle at it's official documentation page, http://tentacle.readme.io

Getting an Octoblu Account

first step when it comes to connecting a microcontroller to Octoblu is to, well, get an account with Octoblu. It's free (and always will be) and can be done in less than a minute @ https://app.octoblu.com

Create a Device in Octoblu

this step generates an ID for device in Meshblu, Octoblu's open-source message routing system. This lets us send messages to and from the microcontroller.

Right now, Octoblu redirects you to the Flow Designer by default. So make sure you head back to the Things page to continue.

You'll notice the icon for your Tentacle is grayed out - this means the device is currently offline.

Now, leave this page open - We're going to do some stuff on the Arduino side for a bit!

Enabling The Tentacle on your Arduino

Note: although we prefer the Photon at Octoblu, we know that Arduinos are by far the most common microcontrollers out there these days. For the Photon, the steps are similar, but using their website at http://build.particle.io . The library is called "tentacle-particle", and can be found here.

The latest release of the library can be found here. Make sure to download tentacle-build-arduino.zip. The source for this repo sets up the project, and is not the code for the project itself.

Make sure you select tentacle-build-arduino.zip!

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Add Octoblu's Thing UUID to your sketch

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Congratulations! You can now drop your microcontroller into the Flow Designer and control it with anything else in the Internet of Things!

Note: one limitation of The Tentacle is that you can't specify analog pins by their usual A* designations (A0, A1, A2, etc). We hope to change this soon. In the meantime, this means you just have to reference the pins by their actual numbers - such as 16 instead of A0, and so on.