ioBridge team member, Josh, and his wife recently celebrated the birth of a baby… congrats! After a few months of settling into the sleep patterns and the whims of their bundle of joy, Josh came up with the idea to put ioBridge to work to solve a basic need for the family. They wanted to preserve breast milk in the freezer. With some research, they found that breast milk has precise temperature requirements for long-term storage.

Josh had some clear goals to ensure that the breast milk was stored properly:

1. Know the real-time temperature of the freezer
2. Send alerts if temperatures get too warm
3. Monitor the state of power at our home
4. Send alerts if power is out

In this case, adding some remote monitoring smarts to the otherwise “dumb” freezer, is the perfect solution. Josh ran a temperature probe into the freezer and connected it to a channel on the ioBridge Io-204 web gateway. On ioBridge.com, he created a data log to monitor the temperature of the freezer and set an email alert for the temperature required to store breast milk for an extended period of time. Josh also connected the Io-204 to the same power source as the freezer, so that if power was lost to the freezer it would also be lost the IO-204. ioBridge tracks whether these devices are connected, so that you can monitor their Online / Offline status. Josh cleverly connected an API call to the device to a site monitoring service and now is able to monitor the up time of his freezer just like monitoring the up time of a server.

The Internet of Things is in its infancy, but it can be very practical despite the recent articles referring to the number of devices to impress upon us just the sheer volume. To us it’s all about finding useful applications and introducing them to consumers to find our early majority product and service. We believe in and see a connected future, but we want it to be so useful that people don’t have to think about the technology. Like when you are using an iPad, are you concerned over capacitive touch technology or that it’s really easy to play games? Maybe by the time Josh’s baby grows up and enters college, the Internet of Things will be as common place and transparent as indoor plumbing.

Check out Josh’s blog for more details on setting up his breast milk monitoring system using ioBridge and a bonus project on using the Edimax Nanorouter to add Wi-Fi to the ioBridge IO-204 Monitor and Control Module.

[via MojoHo.com]