Love it or hate it, for many people embedded systems means Arduino. Now Arduino is leveraging its more powerful MKR boards and introducing a cloud service, the Arduino IoT Cloud. The goal is to make it simple for Arduino programs to record data and control actions from the cloud.

The program is in beta and features a variety of both human and machine interaction styles. At the simple end, you can assemble a dashboard of controls and have the IoT Cloud generate your code and download it to your Arduino itself with no user programming required. More advanced users can use HTTP REST, MQTT, Javascript, Websockets, or a suite of command line tools.

The system relies on “things” like temperature sensors, LEDs, and servos. With all the focus on security now, it isn’t surprising that the system supports X.509 authentication and TLS security for traffic in both directions.

Honestly, we tried it and the web-based IDE couldn’t find our MKR1000 board under Linux. That could be a misconfiguration on our part, but it is frustrating how little information you get from many web-based tools. It decided we had multiple Arduinos connected (we didn’t). Then removing a multiport serial adapter made it see no Arduinos even though there was an MKR1000 Vidor attached.

Naturally, there are plenty of options when it comes to putting devices on the cloud. However, if you are only using Arduino boards, this one is going to be pretty seamless — assuming it works for you.