Category: Internet of Things

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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

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Update 2014-11-16: You should read my Twine Update if you are considering the purchase of a Twine.

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.
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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

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Good Night LampThe Good Night Lamp should be available in the Fall of 2012. It is sort of an ambient status update for friends and loved ones. It works by connecting big lamps and little lamps, over the internet. When the big lamp turns on, so do the little ones.

This is a great way to share a connection with someone across town, or across the globe. It’s nice because it isn’t really about “tracking” somebody, nor does it require a lot of effort to update your status with some witty message.

A nice future enhancement could be an outlet or something that one could plug an existing lamp (or other device) into that controls the associated little lamps.

Image by: Good Night Lamp