Arduino has announced the official release of Arduino IoT Cloud, an “Internet of Things Application Platform” enabling you to easily develop and manage IoT apps.

Arduino IoT Cloud officially sees light of day

The system first emerged back in February. Previously, Arduino boards would require programming via a sketch, but the Arduino IoT Cloud now provides an alternative route.

It will, says Arduino, quickly and automatically generate a sketch when setting up a new “thing”. The goal is to go from unboxing a board to a working device within five minutes.

The platform integrates with Amazon Alexa, Google Sheets, IFTTT and ZAPIER, which enables users to program and manage devices using voice, spreadsheets, databases, and automate alerts using webhooks.

For more advanced users, it also enables other methods of interaction, including HTTP REST API, MQTT, Command-Line Tools, Javascript, and Websockets.

“As technology progresses, things that were impossible to imagine a few years ago are becoming much easier to approach,” said Fabio Violante, CEO of Arduino. “But when we talk about leveraging the power and robustness of embedded systems to connect physical objects and environments with the cloud, a lot of skills are required. Our aim at Arduino is to lower this barrier to entry for IoT and ultimately, democratise technology.”

“This has been our mission forever, and is why we are investing time, money and energy to build our holistic approach that goes from connected hardware for super secure IoT nodes, like our MKR Wifi 1010 board, Nano 33 IoT or Portenta H7 for the PRO market, to our user friendly cloud and development environments.”

Features of Arduino IoT Cloud include templated solutions to minimise coding, Plug & Play onboarding to automatically generate a sketch when setting up a new device and an ‘On-the-go’ mobile dashboard allowing users to access sensor monitoring.

Users can also upgrade their plan to power-up their tools and access additional features, a Create Maker plan which comes at a cost of $6.99 per month (which was made free during the lockdown). It allows you to connect more ‘things’, save more sketches, increase data storage on the cloud and access unlimited compilation times.

The Create Professional plan is also aimed at businesses.