We are pleased to announce the release of a new officially supported client library for the Adafruit IO API! We now have an client library for Go. This client meets a few goals for us, and hopefully provides a useful hook into Adafruit IO for curious and interested web developers.

It’s my (Adam) first project with the IO team, and so is a good starting place for exploring both the external API and the internal systems that drive it. It’s also a good chance for me to introduce my teammates to Go which is a very pleasant language to write web-connected code in. I’m a Rubyist by trade but exploring Go for lower level and Machine-to-Machine web services. I like it.

More client libraries means broader coverage of the Adafruit IO API. As web developers, we aren’t often forced to think of the systems we build from the outside in. By making a public API and building the client libraries for it, we have a chance to see what works and doesn’t work. That’s both from a design perspective–is this API “friendly”?–and from a very practical perspective. For example, I committed two bug fixes to Adafruit IO’s core codebase while building io-client-go, huge success! Today, this library covers version 1 of the Adafruit IO API, but we’re hard at work on version 2.

More client libraries means more open doors for new developers. Adafruit IO’s primary goal is to be the easiest way to get your Internet of Things project online. That involves a big team of people at Adafruit working at every part of the stack: engineers building new hardware and writing new firmware, makers coming up with new projects and spending a lot of time on clearly communicating what they’re doing, web developers inventing new ways of building an accessible Internet of Things platform, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, an awesome crowd of people who can think of things to do with the tools we build that we cannot think of ourselves.

This library isn’t the ending place for anyone’s project, but it could be the starting place for all kinds of interesting work. We don’t know! That’s the point! Here, take this, we made it for you, enjoy! :D

This isn’t the first client library we’ve built and it won’t be the last. If Go isn’t your style yet, make sure to check out similar tools in Python, Javascript, and Ruby. And when you’re using the things we’ve built in the Things you’re building, feel free to talk to us and tell us what’s good, what’s bad, or what you’d like to see. Leave a note in the bug tracker, on the forum, or in the respective client library’s GitHub repository.

And please, show us what you’re making! We would LOVE to see it almost as much as (I hope) you loved to build it. Also, speaking as a new member of the Adafruit team, I have never met a group of people more genuinely committed to supporting people at every level of experience than here at Adafruit.

As always, Adafruit’s open source work is supported by the clever, creative folks who shop at Adafruit and by the community that contributes in code to any of our open source projects.

Current status:

We will be deploying a new feature to our MQTT broker tomorrow morning. We will start broadcasting the current time in two formats at time/ISO-8601 and time/seconds at one second intervals. This should allow users to easily keep track of the current time from devices without real time clocks.

Here are a couple examples of the payloads:

ISO-8601:

topic: time/ISO-8601
payload: 2016-06-01T21:34:12.629Z

Seconds since Unix epoch:

topic: time/seconds
payload: 1464816851

We did some profiling of our node MQTT workers using the --prof flag today, and we found that our workers were spending an excessive amount of time handling MQTT connection authorization. It turns out that a few users were hammering our servers with failed auth attempts, so we decided to implement a rate limit for MQTT connection attempts.

The new connection rate limit allows for 50 connection attempts in a 15 minute window, and attempts past the limit will be rejected for the remainder of the window. If you would like to comment on this change, please visit our IO forum.

Hello all you lovely makers! I am very excited to introduce myself: my name is Adam Bachman, I am here to write code and chew bubblegum, and I am all out of bubblegum! As of May 23, 2016, I am the newest member of the Adafruit team and will mainly be working with Justin, Todd, Tyler, and the rest of the incredibly talented folks making Adafruit IO the best it can be.

I’ve been a resident of Baltimore City, making my way through the world as a software developer for the last 10 years. By day building software for Fortune 500’s, startups, bootstrapped artist-loving theater makers, and a few in between. On my own time I’ve been an Adafruit customer since 2007, started a hackerspace in 2009, and I’m super into Processing and creative code in general.

You can follow me on Github or Twitter if you like, though I can’t promise to be half as interesting as the people at the middle of this incredible enterprise :D

ENOUGH ABOUT ME! I look forward to connecting with anyone crossing boundaries from software to hardware and back again. Artists, makers, hobbyists, professionals, first-timers, long-timers, indie, corporate, all of you, everyone, cats, maybe not so much dogs, whatever! I am psyched to get started, let’s make amazing things!

We’ve made some more backend changes to how the AIO Keys are generated and maintained. If you run into any authentication or strange AIO Key issues please let us know as soon as possible in the IO forum or Issues Tracker.

Most of the changes were security enhancements, but we’re laying the groundwork for more features specifically related to the AIO Keys, including added administration functionality.