What do the Big Ben Clock, MyToaster, and T-800 have in common? They all use Twitter (and are completely absurd)!
Check out this article on ABC.es.
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Las 10 cuentas de Twitter más divertidas y absurdas
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CheerLights: my lights are linked to everyone else’s
If you have been following my projects for the last 12 years, you probably figured out that I must have a master plan. And this plan involves connecting things to the Internet that may or may not turn against us in the future. Way back in 2001, my partners and I released FuzzBox – this technology allowed for artificial intelligence to be distributed to devices via the Web. Our thoughts were if the decision making could be made on the Internet the devices themselves could focus on their task vs. trying to be a super device on their own. This was way early on and the ideas were premature, but it started a series of events and failures that led to even more projects involving devices linked together over the web. I guess this is now called, “The Internet of Things“.
Something that has emerged over the years is social networking. I have been fascinated by the idea of collective intelligence. It’s fun to follow a football game on Twitter or on Facebook’s live stream. You get to see the take other’s have on the same event that you are experiencing. If the Steelers score, you can feel it reverberate through social networks. These networks only work if there is lots of participation by many people. I have heard that people have predicted STD out breaks from Twitter status updates, food poisoning sources, and even where earthquakes have taken place. This is fascinating to me.
The results are two-fold: you can learn from this data and that we are all connected. Enter in, CheerLights – CheerLights is my combination of distributed devices with social networking. This project that involves connecting multicolored lights to other people’s lights and allow Twitter keywords control them all. If someone tweets, “@cheerlights let’s go green” – every light connected to the project would change to green. To me this is a physical representation of a social network trending topic. It’s a way to share a moment in that moment. Just like with social networking, CheerLights requires scale to be very interesting. If you check out CheerLights.com, you will see how to build a set of lights that are linked together with other people’s lights via Twitter. I have examples using things from ioBridge, Arduino, and Digi. Please let me know if you decide to build something and connect it to CheerLights.
We are all connected. That’s my purpose for building all of this technology. Nothing else matters.
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Internet of Things DCWEEK Workshop during DCWEEK
DCWEEK invited me to host a dedicated workshop for the Internet of Things. We had a session learning about what IoT is all about, some basics of electronics, and then a hands on section. In a matter of minutes, we had things online. A group sent a tweet from a button and others moved a motor from a web page. It was great to see a roomful of adults happy to tinker with some new technology. What a great experience!
[via ioBridge Blog]
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Internet of Things Talk at Carnegie Mellon University
Last weekend was the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. I gave a talk on the Internet of Things and building apps using the Perl programming language as the connective tissue between devices and web applications. I covered the basics on how you interface devices to the real-world. I also hosted a Hardware Hackathon and got to discuss hardware, connecting things, and Perl. I introduced everyone to my remixed theory of innovation. Just get out there and copy a well documented project, learn by transforming some part of the project, and combine it with other ideas. This is the only way innovation has ever happened… Thanks for the awesome time at PPW!
Here are my slides from the 2011 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop:
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Top 100 “Internet of Things” Thinkers
We all love lists and some lists are really cool to be on. Postcapes selected me as one of the Top 100 Thinkers in the emerging field of the “Internet of Things”. They based their decision on many criteria, but I think the one item that sets me a part is my charisma (CHA of 16 is nothing to sneeze at). I am on the list at #88! It’s honor to be included with so many of the people that I have been following during my career.
From Postcapes,
As a Software Developer at ioBridge and active speaker, and developer (including having over 800 people following his toaster on Twitter) in the Internet of Things space Hans Scharler is someone to watch as he sits on the interesting intersection of DIY’ers and corporate products.
Follow Hans and his latest on Twitter @scharler.