A Plugin is an extension of Ubidots' feature set, which is provided by either one of our partners, or the Ubidots team itself.
Plugins come in different flavors, depending on how they reflect in your Ubidots account. Currently, only Data Plugins are supported:
Data Plugins: These plugins ingest data from external services, and store it in an Ubidots device.
Other types to be enabled in the future are:
Dashboard Plugins: These plugins specify new types of Widgets that can be added to your dashboards.
Events Plugins: These plugins specify new types of Event actions, which become available to use within our Events engine module.
To enable a Plugin, go to the "Plugins" option in the "Devices" menu:
Then click on the "+" icon in the upper right corner, select a Plugin, and follow the on-screen instructions:
After configuring the Plugin, a new item will appear on the list. Please allow a few seconds for the plugin to finish its provisioning process, and then refresh your browser:
When the status of the Plugin is "Running" then you should see the expected output happen within your account; in the case of a data plugin, this would be a new device:
Available Plugins
Presently, the following Data Plugins are available:
AWS IoT Core: Receive and decode data from devices connected to AWS IoT Core.
OpenWeather: Weather conditions for a user-defined location, with data from over 200,000 cities.
The Things Stack: Receive and decode data from LoRaWAN devices connected to The Things Stack network server.
Helium: Receive and decode data from LoRaWAN devices connected to Helium's People's Network.
USGS WaterWatch Service: A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) service with current water streamflow conditions in the United States. This plugin will create a device with current real-time streamflow conditions from the specified site number.
Daily Exchange Rates: A free Exchange Rates API for current and historical foreign exchange rates published by the European Central Bank.
Please note that plugins are currently only available to Admin users; your App's end users won't see the "Plugins" option in the Devices menu.
Plans & Billing
Plugins are available to all IoT entrepreneur license holders and above. In the future, we might open this feature to STEM accounts, with limited capacity.
The resulting charges of a Plugin are a function of two factors:
Plugin price: Even though most plugins are Free, there might be selected ones that generate a one-time or recurring price specified by the Plugin developer.
Cloud functions executions: Plugins are built on top of our UbiFunctions engine, and hence will generate charges at million-executions increments. See our current plans to check the applicable UbiFunctions pricing.
For example, if you have 50 Plugins running every minute, then the resulting charges would be:
Plugin price: $0
Cloud functions executions: 50 plugins x 60 executions per hour x 24h x 30d = 2,160,000 executions, which gets rounded to 3 million executions @ $5 per million.
Total monthly charges: $15
Please note that executions are metered in 2-seconds increments. If your plugin takes more than 2 seconds to run, then it would be metered as 2 or more executions.
To our Partners:
Would you like to create a partner plugin? Feel free to send your ideas via email at partners@ubidots.com. Plugins can be developed by third parties with minimal coding effort.
IoT Community and Customers
Have a Plugin idea in mind? Feel free to send your suggestions via the in-app chat channel or via email at support@ubidots.com.