The Internet Of Bubble Machines

Everyone loves a good bubble machine. These oddly satisfying novelty items have brought children and adults mindless entertainment since their inception. [8BitsAndAByte] had the same thought, but wanted to give their bubble machine a taste of the IoT-age.

First, they modified an off-the-shelf bubble machine with a Raspberry Pi and relay module. The Pi can easily trigger the bubbling mechanism by controlling power to the machine using the relay. Seems simple enough. The part of this project that might be a bit more unfamiliar to you is controlling the robot over the internet using remo.tv.

Remo.tv is a robot controller platform that’s both free and open-source, and we’ve seen [8BitsAndAByte] take advantage of this web controller before. Seems like they’re really getting the hang of it. Their writeup links to a detailed setup guide for configuring the Pi, so hopefully, that’s not too much trouble.

Couple the IoT setup with a Pi camera and you’ve got a live stream that’s admittedly oddly satisfying to watch with or without the bubbles.

https://youtu.be/Mp7LrYoTGsY

15 thoughts on “The Internet Of Bubble Machines

  1. I made one of these, but the Raspberry Pi was too difficult to program so I used HP Proliant quad Xenon running Windows Server 2019 Enterprise with Visual Studio C#. It takes 20 minutes to boot but hey ho.

    1. I think it would only come up for “IoT bubble” if it was dense in mentions of “IoT bubble”, if it did not have many mentions of “IoT bubble” then it probably will not show when you search for “IoT bubble”.

      1. Maybe Google servers would index “IoT bubble” and positively rank a page with several “IoT bubble” mentions, and put such page at the top of “IoT bubble” searches – but as RW said, only if “IoT bubble” were mentioned enough times. Do you guys believe that “IoT bubble” should appear more on such page, or there are enough “IoT bubble”? =D

        1. Hmm…

          To “IoT Bubble” or not to “IoT Bubble”. That is the question.

          Whether to suffer the mess and sticky residue of excessive “IoT Bubble”,
          Or to take a hammer to those responsible for “IoT Bubble”,
          and thus end the “IoT Bubble”.

          1. Unfortunately, it didn’t take very long for Google to realize people tried to game their SEO, so I think that saying “IoT Bubble” too many times on the same page may actually affect adversely the Page’s ranking on a search for “IOT Bubble”

          2. Yes it appears it dropped to 7th from 6th when I looked late yesterday. Maybe the goog prefers the more clickbaity type headlines such as “Experts predict huge IoT bubble crash in Q3 2020” or articles like the Woz saying he was first to predict and first to be personally affected by the great IOT bubble crash of 2020. Lets just hope we don’t cause some pension fund’s sentiment bot to freak out and cause a real iot bubble pop though and lose a load of widows their money in the stock market decline.

    1. I am sure you could. Actually an RPI Zero may even fit in the case :) . Thing is, the RPI makes it so ‘convenient’ to use and a familiar environment. For example, I have a ‘light’ on/off application at home using an RPI Zero with Wifi. Why? There was no need for real-time. A few lines of python code and I had a working application. Seems like I am always reaching for an RPI when I want to try something…..

      1. What confuses me is the use of RPi everywhere for what is effectively just a switch – Running a full OS to respond to an HTTP request to turn something on or off seems totally overkill.

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