In the previous chapters of the book, we mainly kept things local when performing measurements on the Arduino board with the Ethernet shield. For example, we sent some measured data back to a database on your computer and displayed the measurements there.

In this chapter, we are going to take a different approach. We are going to integrate the Ethernet shield into an Internet of Things perspective. This means that instead of logging measurements locally within your local network, we are going to automatically send the measured data to a cloud service called Xively. The purpose of the Xively website is to store data that comes from your devices and display this data on their website. This way, your data will be available at any time and can be accessed from anywhere.

The following will be the major takeaways from this chapter: