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This page assumes knowledge of the process of data ingestion in Formant. For more information, see the Ingestion page in our Quick Reference section, and How telemetry streams work for an in-depth guide.

In Formant, ingestion is the process by which data is added to telemetry streams in the Formant cloud and becomes available for query.

The primary method of data ingestion is via the Formant agent, which provides buffering logic, ROS compatibility, default telemetry streams, and adapter capability. However, in certain circumstances, you may want to ingest data directly to the Formant cloud without installing the Formant agent on your robot. In these cases, you can use the ingest method of the Cloud SDK to add data directly to Formant.

This functionality could be useful when installation of the agent is impractical, such as on a low-power embedded system, or when using a cloud server proxy for many devices. You may also want to query, perform an analysis, and ingest side-by-side metadata on an analysis server.

You can see an example of direct data ingestion via the Cloud SDK on our GitHub page: GitHub: ingest.py.