About MATLAB® Analysis and Visualizations Inside ThingSpeak

ThingSpeak enables you to schedule and run MATLAB code using a version of MATLAB that MathWorks hosts in the cloud. You do not need a MATLAB license to run MATLAB within the ThingSpeak web service.

If you have a MATLAB license, you can also import your data from ThingSpeak into your desktop MATLAB session for offline analysis using the ThingSpeak Support Toolbox.

Limitations

If you are logging in to ThingSpeak with a MathWorks Account that is not associated with a MATLAB license, the MATLAB code that you can run within the ThingSpeak environment is limited to functions provided by MATLAB. If you are logging in with a MatWorks Account that is associated with a MATLAB license that is also licensed to use add-on toolboxes, functions provided by certain add-on toolboxes are supported.

You can use MATLAB code and visualizations within ThingSpeak with some limitations on frequency and update rate:

  1. A TimeControl can schedule a MATLAB Analysis to execute no faster than 5-minute intervals.
  2. MATLAB Visualizations (plots) added to a channel are updated after 10 minutes.

Additional limitations that produce an error are:

  1. For Standard and Academic license use types, code in the MATLAB Analysis app or the MATLAB Visualizations app that takes longer than 60 seconds to execute in the cloud produces an error. For all other license use types, including free users, code in the MATLAB Analysis app or the MATLAB Visualizations app that takes longer than 20 seconds to execute in the cloud produces an error.
  2. For Standard, Academic, Home and Student license types, code in the MATLAB Analysis app or the MATLAB Visualizations app that writes data to a channel at a rate faster than every second produces an error. For users of the free option, code in the MATLAB Analysis app or the MATLAB Visualizations app that writes data to a channel at a rate faster than once every 15 seconds produces an error.
  3. Code in the MATLAB Analysis app that contains visualization functions produces an error.