ioBridge Project by Ryan Rusnak Featured in Best Buy Commercial

December 21, 2012 By

If you happen to be kicking back and watching TV over the Holidays, chances are you are going to see a Best Buy Commercial. Best Buy’s new commercial campaign is called, “Gifts That Do”.  [Ryan Rusnak] created a beverage cannon using a mini-fridge, air compressor, servo motors, and network connectivity with an ioBridge gateway. Using his smartphone, Ryan selects, aims, and fires a “beverage” over 20 feet to himself sitting on the couch in front of his flat screen TV from LG. The TV being a gift from his mom. Best Buy was inspired by Ryan’s project and featured him on their latest advertisement. Check it out on YouTube!

Congrats, Ryan! It’s great seeing an ioBridge project on TV mixed in with a movie marathon of The Christmas Story, football, and reruns of Seinfeld.

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CheerLights Nominated for Best DIY Internet of Things Project

December 14, 2012 By

CheerLights is a worldwide network of multicolored lights that are synchronized together. When one color changes, all of the lights around the world change to that color. Colors are changed by sending a Tweet mentioning “cheerlights” and a color. This project is part of ioBridge Labs where we spend time on research and development of new projects, typically focused on the Internet of Things. CheerLights emerged from one of our Skunk Works projects.

We have the distinct honor of being nominated for an award. CheerLights has been nominated by Postscapes for the Best DIY Internet of Things project project for 2012. These are the 2nd annual Internet of Things Awards. Last year, we won for TideAlerts – our open network of tide level monitoring stations.

Please take a moment and vote for CheerLights and your favorite Internet of Things projects. Thanks!

Best Internet of Things Project by ioBridge CheerLights 2012

[via Postscapes Internet of Things Awards 2012]

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Beer Robot – Popular Science Inventions of the Year

June 22, 2011 By

Master tinkerer [Ryan Rusnak] created the very popular BEER ROBOT. With a press of button on Ryan’s iPhone, the mini fridge armed with an air cannon and webcam fires a beer at him with deadly accuracy. Ryan linked the controls to the iPhone using the ioBridge IO-204 module. So, in reality he could control his creation from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Less exciting and deadly are Ryan’s ability to remotely monitor and control the temperature of the refrigerator also via ioBridge.

The Mini Fridge Beer Robot is featured in Popular Science magazine in the June 2011 issue: Inventions of the Year. In this PopSci, you can learn how-to create your very own beer firing robot with a step-by-step guide. The beer robot, dubbed the ioFridge, is the perfect connection between man and machine! And, when we created ioBridge, you better believe we saw a future of armed machines that are web-enabled. Congrats on making PopSci and getting us one step closer…

PopSci Inventions of The Year ioBridge Mini Fridge Beer Robot

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Make Your Own Snowbird Snow Meter

February 1, 2011 By

If you head over to Instructables, you will find many how-to guides and step-by-step instructions on how you can make things. It’s kind of like recipes for everything. Today I came across another brilliant project from Noel Portugal from the My Web of Things blog. This time Noel builds a snow meter displaying the live snow fall for any ski resort right on your desk before heading out to the slopes.

As my snowboarding trip approaches, I find myself checking Utah Snowbird’s snowcam a few times a day, wishing for more snow to accumulate on my favorite ski resort.

Snowbird Snow Meter

Snowbird Snow Meter

Noel shows you how to create your own snow meter using the ioBridge IO-204 and the Servo Smart Board. He connects the Snowbird’s weather data to ioBridge using the Widget API that controls a servo motor position that corresponds to the snow accumulation. Here’s a video of the Snow Meter in action:

As a bonus project, Noel also shows you how to link the Snowbird weather feed to Twilio, so you can get personalized snow updates via the phone or SMS. Check out the complete “” on Instructables.com.

Let it snow!

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Network and iPhone Controlled Mini Fridge, Drink Cannon

December 25, 2010 By

Just in time for New Years, here’s a network-controlled mini fridge that shoots drinks at you that you select with an iPhone web app. The fridge is connected to the web app using an ioBridge IO-204, sends video clips to Twitter (@MyBeerRobot) , and has a web cam to aim the “50 psi” air cannon.

From the YouTube description:

This is the maiden voyage of my mini fridge that now shoots beers via iPhone. It is controlled by an iobridge via a web based iPhone interface and shoots the beers from an air cannon in the housing. Special thanks to Graham Phero for air cannon construction and Josh Lilly for web and graphic development.

Features:

  • Vends 4 types of beer
  • Broadcasts temperature
  • Adjust temperature via iPhone
  • Aim via webcam
  • Auto tweet video per shot
  • Fire beer with 50psi of deliciousness
Mini Fridge Beer Cannon Close-up

Mini Fridge Beer Cannon Close-up

Update:

We got a chance to talk with the inventor of the Mini Fridge Beer Robot and here are some more details.

The app is served from a NetBeans server and interfaces with the ioBridge Widget API to send the controls for selecting the beer, aiming / firing the air cannon, and setting the fridge temperature. The app also displays the fridge temperature.

Here are screenshots of the iPhone web app in action:

Mini Fridge Beer Cannon Robot

Mini Fridge Beer Cannon Robot

“Perhaps the Best Beer Bot Ever To Grace a Dorm Room.”

This project is sure getting around with over 120k 200k views so far between YouTube and Break.com. To check the blog roundup, visit TUAW, Gizmodo, Break, BroBible, Wired.com, Engadget, and Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 Blog.

Here’s another take of the beer cannon in action:

Combine this with the Serv O’Beer and you have a complete drink delivery system.

Happy New Year! Cheers!

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