Getting Started with Tinamous.com

Membership

In this section we look at the core membership concepts used by Tinamous.

Organisation Account

At the top level Tinamous uses an Organisation Account to keep all of your devices, members and data separate from other members accounts. Your account is accessed by it's own account name based web address (A sub-domain of the Tinamous.com address).

You may invite other people to join your account (See Members). You and the other members of your account will be able see the devices and data within this account. You may be a member of other Tinamous Organisational accounts whilst still keeping your data private withing your own Organisational account area.

To access your Tinamous Organisational account you use the address https://[your account name].Tinamous.com

Your Account name is the account name you specified when registering with Tinamous. It should be a single word made of letters and numbers only.

This is the address you need for web API and MQTT access, either using your user account or for your devices to connect.
Third party applications that connect to your Tinamous account will need to know either your account name or the full address.

You can edit your account options from the Account option in the top navigation menu. Accounts have a number of options, these include:

  • Display Name: This is a more friendly name for your account and shows in the top left of the navigation bar.
  • Registration: Control how other members can join your account. The options are:
    • Invite Only: You have to send the person an invite from Tinamous for them to join.
    • Open: Anybody may join via a registration link on the login page.
    • Closed: Nobody else may join.
  • Welcome Message: This is message to show on the login page. It may, for example, be a friendly welcome describing your account, or a legal disclaimer.
  • Inbound Emails: You can configure how Tinamous treats emails sent to your account. Which senders are allowed to post to the timeline via email and which are blocked.

Members

Your organisational account can consist of many members, these are yourself and anybody that has joined your account. You can control who is allowed to become a member via the organisational account settings.

You should not use a Member account for devices, members have different abilities to access and modify data. Members and devices share many common properties.

Members have the following settings:

  • Display Name: This is a more friendly version of the username. e.g. your real name.
  • Allow Duplicates: If the member is allowed to post duplicate messages to the timeline.
  • Description: A description of the member.
  • Access Control: What access the member is allowed. (e.g. read only, read write).
  • Locked: If the member account is locked. (i.e. due to too many failed password attempts).
  • Approved: If the members account has been approved for access to the organisational account.
  • Email Address: The members email address. This needs to be verified before email notifications can be sent to the member.
  • Cell Phone: This needs to be verified before sms notifications can be sent. You can also use SMS messages to post status posts to the timeline. This needs your phone number to be able to assign these to the correct account.

Currently member details can only be edited from the Timeline page by the member. Click your username in the Members section of the timeline then Settings to edit your Member settings.

Devices

Devices represent your accounts Internet of Things "Things". These would typically send in sensor measurements and status posts. Sensor measurements (e.g. temperature) can be seen on the devices page and on the dashboard, status posts can be viewed on the timeline.

Devices may be added by the "Add Device" option on the Devices page or automatically created by Bots.

You may find it useful to group your devices with tags. These can then be used to filter or group your devices for notifications or dashboard widgets.

You can programmatically create devices via the API using a POST message to the Devices API Endpoint. Devices don't currently support auto-enrollment outside of Bots.

A device may submit sensor measurements by POSTing to the SENML API or via the MQTT server using the Measurements topic. The message document should be in the senml format. See the Sensor Measurements section for more information on sending measurements.

Devices created by bots typically do not support accessing the API or MQTT server. However you can modify the device properties to allow this. The bot is also typically responsible for creating measurements and status posts from the devices it managed. Sensor measuremets added via bot based devices still support the special fields.

Devices may also post status messages to the timeline. This can be useful for monitoring the device for special events e.g. a power cycle. Devices can also read the timeline and may look for mentions of itself to perform actions.

Device fields are created automatically when sensor measurements are submitted. You may edit these and give them more friendly names and also disable them from being shown on the default device chart.

Legacy device tips: If you have devices that don't support HTTP or MQTT but send email or sms messages, you can create a member account to represent the device and then have your device send email/sms messages to appear on the timeline and/or trigger notifications. Be sure to set the devices email or sms number. These don't need to be verifiede for incomming messages.

Tinamous tracks when your device sends measurements and status posts and will flag your device as "Not Reporting" after a configurable time. This can be used to send you a notification to warn you that something has happened to your device.

Bots

Bots are helpers that perform integrations with 3rd party connected devices (e.g. the Particle.io cloud) or provide additional functionality.

When you created your Tinamous organisational account a Virtual Device Bot was automatically added. This created three virtual devices which submit measurements and status posts to give you an idea how devices work within Tinamous. These devices and the virtual device bot may be removed.

One of the most useful bots is the Particle Bot. This will link to your Particle.io account, find your devices (core, photon, electrons etc.) and create devices in Tinamous to match these.
Then when your device publishes an event with the appropriate event name this gets automatically assigned as a sensor measurement or a status post, or the devices current location.

You can read more about the available Bots here and the Particle Bot here