Christmas Lights Synchronized Around the World to Twitter, Powered by the Internet of Things

December 4, 2013 By

For the third holiday season in a row, the CheerLights project is gearing up. The idea behind CheerLights is to show that we are all connected by synchronizing the color of lights around the world. Christmas lights are a staple around the holidays and with Internet-connected lights, the color of your lights matches the color of everyone else’s lights.

It has been a real treat watching this project evolve as more and more people add lights… and other things. Things like Android and iPhone apps that check the latest color of CheerLights, an old Commodore 64, and Christmas trees.

To control the lights around the world, send a Tweet mentioning @CheerLights and a color. The command is processed by ioBridge’s ThingSpeak platform and distributed to all of the lights listening to the CheerLights API.

@CheerLights I am dreaming of a White Christmas

Another powerful aspect of the CheerLights project is that is shows off what is possible with the emerging Internet of Things. With a single message sent via a social network like Twitter, 1000’s of objects around the world are in sync with each other. Lights are connected by many types of controllers, such as Arduino, ioBridge, Philips, and the Raspberry Pi. This project is only possible through the Internet and the coordination of developers around the world.

Learn how to join the project at CheerLights.com.

We are all connected…

[via CheerLights]

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TIME Magazine: Going From Twitter Toasters to Manufacturers

July 30, 2013 By

, a contributor from TIME.com, covered our social toaster that I created back in 2008. But, Jacob took the story a few steps further and explained what might happen as more objects get connected. He also talks about FeedandGo, a mobile device controlled pet feeder, and iAquaLink, a pool control system that updates you on its status through an app. Both of these examples are taking the seeds of our technology planted in 2008 and taken beyond the novelty to real-world implementation.

@mytoaster may seem strange, but in reality it’s just another example in a widening group of household objects that use social media to make our lives easier. In addition to @mytoaster, there’s a plant that tweets when it needs to be watered and a laundry machine that tweets whenever a load is finished. It’s this concept of an inanimate object giving updates on its activities that interested @mytoaster’s inventor.

Another aspect of the article in TIME, covers the interest in what are things are doing. Imagine using a search engine to find your keys or find out if someone is home at your house by intertwining messages from things along with friends and family. Not all of this data needs to be public – this is why we created ThingSpeak and like the direction that DuckDuckGo is going with search.

Here’s Hans Scharler at the Connected World Conference with @mytoaster and many other connected gadgets and examples of our technology created by our partners:

Hans Scharler at Connected World

The modern “Twitter Toaster” uses the IO-201 Wi-Fi and a power sensor to detect if the toaster is in operation or not. You also get the side benefit of calculating power consumption by measuring the duration of usage.

Read the full article at TIME.com, “Tweeting Toaster Has More Followers Than You”.

[via TIME]

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Connected Appliances at the Connected World Conference

June 21, 2013 By

After a tweet from Peggy Smedley, we found a summary of the Connected World Conference on The iMums website – Reviews by mothers of little gadget lovers. In the review, they mention what they saw from ioBridge. Thanks for the note!

On the lighter side on the ioBridge stand I saw a toaster that tweets every time it makes a slice of toast and a coffee maker that you can text to make you a cup of coffee. ioBridge provides products that allow both professionals and hobbyists to connect pretty much anything to the internet.

Here’s a quick video of the @MyToaster exhibit at the Connected World Conference:

This concept of making things tweet lead us to build social and alerting functions for other devices such as washers and dryers at laundromats, and then lead us to create to our ThingSpeak platform specifically designed to allow devices to post status updates and share object data with other users.

And for fun, follow @MyToaster on Twitter to watch its toasting habits.

[via The iMums]

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From Toasters to Smart Cities, See How ioBridge is Building the Internet of Things

March 7, 2013 By

What is the internet of things?

This might be a question that you have been asking lately as we all keep hearing more about smart things and connected devices. “Internet of Things” concepts were introduced to us over 10-15 years and have shifted from humble object tagging ideas to much more sophisticated concepts. We believe the Internet of Things is an ecosystem of devices and systems interacting with each other using the Internet on behalf of people. This interaction may produce automation systems, social entanglement with our objects, efficiency in systems, brand new product categories, and meaningful analytics.

Claudia Bracholdt of Quartz recently invited Robert Mawrey, CEO of ioBridge, to share our experience and view-point on the Internet of Things. In the following YouTube video, Robert discusses the Tweeting Toaster (@mytoaster) and demonstrates a smart plug that is able to be controlled by a smart phone and social interaction. The smart plug is powered by the ioBridge Iota Wi-Fi Module making anything smart and cloud-connected. Manufacturers use the Iota module or a reference design in many products when they are looking to build scalable, stable, and secure connected products and services.

Using the ioBridge platform, known as RealTime.io (real-time input and output), users are able to build all kinds of interactions among things, people, and apps. RealTime.io provides social context such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare and system context with Email, back-end systems, weather systems, analytic processing, and voice services such as Twilio. Robert mentioned a “tweeting toaster” which tweets when it is in use. This was created over 5 years ago and has stirred up many conversations about connected objects. The idea is not to stop at this humorous example. We ask ourselves, “What does this mean?” and “What else can we do?” Knowing if a toaster is in use can tell us the power consumption of the appliance. What if this was not a toaster but a washer and dryer? You could get notified at laundry mat that your laundry is ready. Instead of a public output to Twitter, how about to sending notifications to phones. This could have been a medical device that is out of spec and alerts you that you need calibration or service and possibly do that calibration remotely.

Social Appliances, Laundry Mats, Powered by ioBridge and the Internet of Things

What else could you do? How about building a smart city. This is exactly what Geosyntec did with the ioBridge platform and devices. Instead of reacting to Twitter, water systems in cities react to weather conditions read in from weather websites, remote locations, local sensors, and now have the ability to make real-time control decisions in determining how water is collected, routed, and used efficiently.

How The "Internet Of Things" Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms

Again, the idea is to keep pushing the ideas further. With ioBridge, we make it possible to create all kinds of newly imagined ideas. Let’s keep the conversation going… Please contact us and see how we can work together and build amazing new things.

[via Quartz]

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Connected Bumblebees: Use Twitter to Follow Bees #buzzisback

May 11, 2012 By

Nik Sargent likes to “do things differently”. Nik is a technologist, artist, data collector, photographer, and bumblebee conservationist.

Busy Bees

Nik’s Bumblebee Project started off in 2011 with the goal of getting to know these amazing, social creatures. As he learned more, he found that the bees documented behavioral patterns were different from observed behavioral patterns due to climate change and unusual weather conditions. Nik observed countless hours of camera footage and discovered that the Queen’s hibernation schedule has been completely disrupted leading to disaster of new bumblebees and subsequent pollination which is critical to our food supply. There are many reports of a decline in pollination and is of global significance.

Earlier this year, Nik added sensors and a gateway from ioBridge to help automate and collect more data generated by these busy bees. The bee boxes now monitor temperature, track movement, count bees, and provide real-time feedback from the bumblebees by being connected to the cloud. The project looks to be evolving as new sensors and ideas will be incorporated over time.

“ioBridge is a big step forward in allowing us to automate and correlate environmental and activity data without resorting to manual CCTV analysis,” said Nik in an email interview. “It gives us the freedom not only to view and collect the data from anywhere remotely,  but also share it and tweet it – again helping to raise awareness.”

Nik was able to capture a photo of the first tweet triggered by a Bumblebee.

Video Still of Bumblebees

And, here’s what she said…

Bumblebee Tweet

We were so happy to find out about this project. We didn’t know much about Bumblebees and learned a lot by following Nik’s project. Thanks for sharing and we hope to do our part to help raise awareness of the global impact and never ending curiosity that bumblebees generate.

To get more info about the Bumblebee Project visit LoveBumbl.es and follow the project on Twitter.

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