Before we dive into the API Reference it is useful to get a brief understanding about how Minut works, what it communicates, and how it does so.

Minut runs on batteries and as such a lot of care is taken to make the batteries last as long as possible. This means that for the most time, communication channels like Wi-Fi, are turned off. It is only activated when necessary and that happens for two reasons. The first reason is regular checkins, called Heartbeats. The heartbeat is a message that Minut sends roughly once an hour to indicate to the backend that it is still alive and well. This message contains all the sensor readings since the last heartbeat, usually some diagnostics, and a check for new configuration or software updates. The other reason is when something out of the ordinary happens, for example, when the Minut detects a sudden temperature drop, an alarm, or other activity. These messages are called Events.

Sensor data

While heartbeats are sent regularly Minut does not expose them directly the API. Instead, and much more useful, is the sensor data they contain. The API provides endpoints to retrieve temperature, humidity, pressure, ambient light, sound, and battery data as continuous time series.

Events

Minut is mostly about events. Events are sent when something out of the ordinary is detected, when a long-running analysis on the backend has yielded some result, or if the user performs certain actions.

There exists a broad range of events that describe user actions, activity in the home, and system information. See Events for a list. Events can be retrieved both from the API and subscribed to via Webhooks. We will explain how to subscribe to events in the next section.

Depending on the type of the event, the fields in the event varies. For instance, an event generated by a sensor value crossing a threshold will contain a reference to the threshold crossed. Whereas a tamper event will only contain a reference to which device was tampered with. Events at least contain the following fields:

{
  "event_id": "string",
  "created_at": "datetime",
  "type": "string"
}

Most of the time they will also include either device_id or user_id.

When doing integrations we highly recommend either subscribing to or reading events rather than sensor data to make sure you get the most up to date information

Webhooks are a great way to react to events as they happen. Rather than implementing a mechanism where you would poll the Minut API at regular intervals, you tell the API about an endpoint that you control to which Minut can send events as they happen.

Example

For the sake of simplifying this example, we are going to use https://webhook.site. It’s an online service that lists HTTP requests directed to it. Since they are only temporary they are not recommended for continued use. Visit the site and make note of the url.

Now we need to set up the subscription. This is done with a POST request to /webhooks as an authenticated user. Make sure to replace $token and $webhook-url with valid values.

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": $webhook-url, "events": ["short_button_press"]}'\
  "https://api.minut.com/v5/webhooks/"

Once this is done, you should be able to press the button on your Minut and see that the event is received in the webhook UI. Another way to test that it works is by doing this request using the webhook id you got from the previous request.

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d {} \
  "https://api.minut.com/v5/webhooks/WEBHOOK_ID/ping"

From now on all events that belong to the user are forwarded to your web service. Minut will automatically retry sending the event roughly 10 times with an exponential back-off. In case all attempts fail, we will not try sending the message again and you have to implement some form of recovery of lost messages yourselves by asking the /events endpoint.

Minut uses Uptimerobot to measure API availability. You can check the most recent status here: https://status.minut.com

We partner with insurances, telcos, and utilities around the world to provide new types of services for end users.

For integrations, we provide enterprise APIs tailored to managing thousands of devices, SLAs and support. Feel free to reach out to Sales for more information at sales@minut.com.

Most endpoints in our API requires the user to be authenticated. For this we use OAuth2. To get started with this you'll need an OAuth client, instructions on how to get one are found here

Before making requests you first need to aquire an access token. How to get a token is well documented on other sites, as well as the official spec: RFC6749. But a quick simple guide follows here:

1. Open this url in a browser:

   https://api.minut.com/v5/oauth/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URI

Make sure to replace CLIENT_ID and REDIRECT_URI with the values you got from our support.

2. The page will ask you to sign in with your Minut account.

3. Accept the prompt asking if your application should be able to access your Minut data.

4. Your browser will redirect to the url provided in the redirect_uri parameter, with a query parameter like so: code=randomcode

5. Perform this request using the code.

6. Use the access_token from the previous request in the Authorization header for all requests to the api:

   Authorization: Bearer access_token

Done!