Live Data
A Spark runs in a sealed sandbox, so on its own it can't show you a live stock price or today's weather. Instead, it asks Lino's broker — a gatekeeper between the Spark and the internet — to fetch that data for it. The broker only fetches from the sources on its allowlist, below.
How it works
A Spark never goes online itself. It hands the broker a request, such as:
"Fetch the quote for AAPL."
The broker checks the request before anything leaves your computer:
- Is this kind of request on the allowlist? Anything else is refused.
- Are the details valid? For example, a stock symbol must look like a stock symbol, and a latitude must be between −90 and 90.
- Is it too frequent? The same request is answered at most about once a second.
Only when all checks pass does Lino — not the Spark — make the request and hand back the result. The Spark's code never touches the network, and no secret keys are ever placed inside a Spark.
The one rule that never bends: untrusted code, secret keys and an open network connection never exist in the same place.
What a Spark can fetch today
This table is generated from the broker's own configuration, so it always matches what is actually allowed.
| Capability | Source | Needs a key? | Example use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stock quotes | Yahoo Finance | No | A watchlist Spark showing live prices and daily change |
| Stock price history (OHLC) | Yahoo Finance | No | A candlestick (K-line) chart with selectable time ranges |
| City geocoding | Open-Meteo Geocoding | No | A weather Spark that lets the user search for a city by name |
| Weather forecast | Open-Meteo | No | A dashboard Spark showing current weather and 7-day forecast with icons |
| Currency exchange rates | Frankfurter (ECB) | No | A currency converter Spark with live rates |
| Historical exchange rates | Frankfurter (ECB) | No | A Spark showing USD/CNY exchange rate trend over the past year |
| Crypto prices | CoinGecko | No | A crypto watchlist Spark showing live prices and 24h change |
| Crypto price history | CoinGecko | No | A Spark showing Bitcoin price chart with selectable time ranges |
A request for anything outside this list is refused, and the Spark gets an error instead of data.
Make a live-data Spark
Ask Lino AI for it in plain words — it knows which sources are available. For example:
- "Build a Spark that shows the current price and daily change for the stocks on this Canvas."
- "Make a weather Spark where I type a city and see the next 7 days."
- "A converter that turns euros into yen at today's rate."
Lino AI can only use the sources in the table above.
Good to know
- Live data needs an internet connection. Without a connection, the request fails and the Spark gets an error instead of data.
- The data comes from the public sources in the Source column, as they report it.
What's coming
- Services that need a key — paid APIs and your own backends, where the key stays with the broker and never enters the Spark.
- More free public data, such as reference lookups — the same broker with a few more entries on the allowlist.
The safety model stays the same throughout: giving Sparks more data means adding entries to the broker's allowlist, never opening the sandbox.