Data Converters Are Now Free on Every Plan

A quick but meaningful update: Data Converters are now available on every Blynk plan, including the free tier. They used to be a paid feature. Now everyone has them.

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If you haven't used them, Data Converters let a device connect to Blynk without any firmware changes. The device sends whatever it already speaks, any HTTP or MQTT payload, to a dedicated endpoint, and a short script on Blynk's side parses it and maps it onto your datastreams. There's a full explainer here, and you don't even have to write the script yourself, Blynk's AI can generate it from your actual payload.

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What changes today is who can use it: everyone. So here are a few things worth trying now that it’s free.

• Bring an off-the-shelf LoRaWAN sensor online. Point The Things Stack or LORIOT at your converter endpoint and a soil, temperature, or door sensor shows up on a dashboard with no code on the device.
• Put a device you didn’t build on a dashboard. Cellular trackers and modules that POST their own format can authenticate by IMEI or ICCID, so a fleet already in the field needs no reflashing.
• Rescue a legacy machine. That old controller posting readings into a spreadsheet can point at a converter instead and land on a real dashboard with history, alerts, and a mobile app.
• Pull in another vendor’s cloud. If a platform can fire a webhook, an energy meter, a weather station, a GPS tracker, that webhook can feed Blynk, so everything lands in one place.
• Connect the gadget that never cooperated. A Shelly relay, an ESPHome node, a Raspberry Pi running a one-line curl. If it can make an HTTP request, it’s now a Blynk device on any plan.

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Everything lands as normal datastreams, so automations, events, the mobile app, and the rest of the platform work exactly as they would for a device running the Blynk library.

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Find Data Converters in your device template under Developer Zone → Templates → Data Converters. They’re free now, so the device you’d written off as too awkward is worth another look.