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Archive for the ‘Internet of Things’ Category

In Defense of “Frivolous” Devices

Little PrinterIt’s easy to look at many IoT devices as expensive toys. While mass production will lower the cost in the future, will they ever be more than cute toys? Tim Maly uses BERG’s Little Printer as an example of where these devices are headed.

Little Printer is a good example. It has a very nice design, and the price is already coming down as the size of their production runs increase. Right now, it is essentially a content delivery device, to which they are continually adding new content options. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s conceivable that there will also be input devices that could be used to interact with this little printer in the near future.

Devices like this printer, and the Good Night Lamp will become more prevalent as the desire to better absorb the information around us increases. Not all information needs or should be presented on screen or behind glass. I look forward to seeing what designers and engineers create in the next few years.

Good Night Lamp Sets Up Shop

Good Night LampI’ve been following the progress of the Good Night Lamp since last summer. Their Kickstarter campaign ending last week without reaching the funding goal isn’t keeping them down–they’ve opened an online shop to take pre-orders. The prices look to be the same as the backer reward levels on Kickstarter. If they can manage to bring most of the backers from the Kickstarter campaign over to make pre-orders, they should do just fine.

The Good Night Lamp team set a lofty goal on Kickstarter, but it seems to have been one that was well thought out, and honest. I respect them for that. It seems that many of the projects put up for crowd funding don’t set their funding goals high enough to realistically produce their product. It appears that team Good Night Lamp did their homework and set a funding goal accordingly. While the Kickstarter might not have reached its primary goal of funding the project, at least they have an idea of the demand at a sustainable price point. More teams seeking crowd funding should follow Good Night Lamp’s lead.

Good Night Lamp Now on Kickstarter

Good Night Lamp
A while back, I linked to the Good Night Lamp project (an internet connected lamp). Since then, they’ve added to their team and made a nice design change.

This week, the project team is at CES where they announced the Good Night Lamp Kickstarter campaign. They are seeking to raise a fair amount of funds (£360,000), with the hope that a large, initial run will yield volume discounts in production. Even so, the backer reward that reserves a pair of lamps isn’t cheap–£89 (~$150 shipped to the US). I hope they find enough backers at this price point to meet their funding goal as this is a nice project.

Photo from Good Night Lamp Kickstarter

Temperature Logging with Twine and ThingSpeak

ThingSpeak Graph
Twine is great. Out of the box, it’s easy to send email and SMS messages, but to really unleash this device’s potential, one needs to explore the HTTP Request action. This makes the Twine a node on the Internet of Things (IoT) and offers a lot of flexibility as to what can happen based on physical input. I’ve written about this before in my First Twine Project, in which I had a Twine and an Arduino talking through a quick and dirty “web service”. This was a fun proof of concept, but calling the PHP I wrote in 10 minutes a web service is a stretch. So, I’ve been looking for a more substantial web service that can be used by the Twine. Twine won’t work with many web services such as cosm (f.k.a. Pachube) or Open Sense, but it does work with at least one: ThingSpeak.

ThingSpeak is quick to set up and offers a fair amount of flexibility. One can read & write data and integrate with other services such as a Twitter or Twilio. ThingSpeak also has the added bonus of being open source, so you can set it up on your own server, if you wish. In my case, I just wanted to do some temperature logging. If you’re interested in how I did it, keep reading, the instructions are after the break.
Read On…

IoT Wireless Network Launches in France

MIT Technology Review reports that a wireless data network for devices is being launched in France. The company, SigFox, promises both low power consumption and low data costs, perfect for the Internet of Things (IoT). This, of course, comes at the cost of speed. However, many IoT applications use minimal bandwidth, so this is a reasonable trade-off.

I wonder when we’ll have a similar network in North America. It would be nice to not lean on WiFi for projects that don’t justify the ongoing cost of current cellular data plans.

via Slashdot