Today we have a guest post from Karl Kaiser; check out his blog to read more about his work with IoT:

I am working with connected devices and was looking for a cloud service. While surveying the field Temboo caught my eye because of the large number of supported premium web sites and the promise to connect IoT devices to the Internet in a breeze.

The connected device I am using is a Spark Core. The Spark Core is a sleek, small board that offers a powerful 32 bit ARM CPU paired with WiFi. The product grew out of a Kickstarter campaign and is rapidly gaining in popularity. The Spark is nicely priced and everything is open source. The team supporting the Spark Core is smart and supportive and made a great choice to port most of the main Arduino APIs to their platform. As outlined in a blog post here, migrating Arduino Libraries to the Spark Core often turns out to be pretty easy.

With Temboo providing an open source library for Arduino, I was tempted to give it a try. However, I had no Temboo-Arduino setup so I was not sure how hard it would be to get it all up and running.

Well, I am happy to report that it was easier than expected. Temboo’s code is well written. I only had to work around some AVR-specific optimizations that Temboo did to save program memory. As the Spark Core is built around a STM32-103F chip, resources are not as tight as with the AVR, so I simply bypassed these optimizations.

Here are some brief instructions for how to install the Temboo Arduino Library. The instructions use the Spark command line SDK setup.

1. Download the modified Temboo Arduino Library source code from GitHub:

mkdir temboo 
cd temboo
git clone http://github.com/Bentuino/temboo.git

2. Get the Spark Core firmware:

git clone https://github.com/spark/core-firmware.git
git clone https://github.com/spark/core-common-lib.git
git clone https://github.com/spark/core-communication-lib.git

// Merge the two source codes
cp -fr core-* temboo
rm core-*

// Overloaded cast operator to allow IPAddress objects to be used 
// where a pointer to a four-byte uint8_t array is expected
// operator uint32_t() { return *((uint32_t*)_address); };

bool operator==(const IPAddress& addr) { return (*((uint32_t*)_address))
== (*((uint32_t*)addr._address)); };
bool operator==(const uint8_t* addr);

4. Save the TembooAccount.h file you generated with Device Coder to temboo-arduino-library-1.2Temboo

5. Now it is time to build the Spark application

cd temboo/temboo/core-firmware/build
make -f makefile.temboo clean all

6. Connect your Spark Core to your computer via a USB cable

7. Push both buttons, release the Reset button and continue holding the other button until RGB-LED lights up yellow

8. Download application into Spark Core

make -f makefile.temboo program-dfu

Two simple Spark application examples are included:

• core-firmware/src/application_gxls.cpp – Example demonstrates the Temboo library with Google Spreadsheet
• core-firmware/src/application_gmail.cpp – Example demonstrates the Temboo library with Gmail

to the source code.

Temboo support for the Spark Core is a lot of fun. It is easy to set up your own Temboo account and compile the Temboo Arduino Library that now supports the Spark Core platform. To learn more about similar projects please visit my blog at http://bentuino.com.