The ThingSpeak IOT controller allows you to interact with IOT devices through the ThingSpeak cloud website at https://www.thingspeak.com. Thingspeak has multiple options for paid accounts as well as completely free options. To get started you'll need to create at least a free account at the ThingSpeak website. A free ThingSpeak account allows you to have 4 separate channels (each ThingSpeak channel can have up to 8 devices associated with it for a total of 32 total devices for a free account). With the free account you get up to 3 million messages/year or approx 8,200 messages/day. With a free account you also have an update limit of once every 15 seconds.
The PowerHome ThingSpeak IOT Controller allows you to interface with a ThingSpeak account. To setup the controller, you'll provide the API URL as well as up to 4 channels in the "Settings" window on the Controllers screen in PowerHome Explorer. For each channel, you'll enter your Read key and Write key. The ThingSpeak API provides for multiple methods of access, update, and reading of data but the PowerHome controller ONLY supports the HTTP API.
Configuring your ThingSpeak "devices" is done in the Analog IO screen with device types of IOT Input, IOT Output, IOT Input (Calc), or IOT Output (Calc). Input device types are intended to primarily read data from the ThingSpeak cloud but you can update the device in the cloud using PowerHome functions. Output device types can both read and update the ThingSpeak cloud with the ability to read/update a single channel/device or declare a separate channel/device for read and a separate channel/device for write.
When configuring your devices in the Analog IO screen, you'll enter the channel ID in the "ROM ID / IP / Topic / Channel" column. For Input devices and Output devices reading and writing to the same channel/device, set the Unit column to 0 and the Point column to the device number (1 thru 8). If your Output device updates a different channel/device from the read operation, enter the update channel ID in the "P Topic / O Channel" column and the update device number in the Unit column (1 thru 8). For both Input and Output device types, you can set a "Poll Interval" in seconds where PowerHome will query the ThingSpeak cloud for the latest data.