internet of things

150 Articles

Open Your Garage Door With Your Smartphone

January 31, 2017 by 42 Comments

The eternal enemy of [James Puderer]’s pockets is anything that isn’t his smartphone. When the apartment building he resides in added a garage door, the forces of evil gained another ally in the form of a garage door opener. So, he dealt with the insult by rigging up a Raspberry Pi to act as a relay between the opener and his phone.

The crux of the setup is Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) — a Google service that allows messages to be sent to devices that generally have dynamic IP addresses, as well as the capacity to send messages upstream, in this case from [Puderer]’s cell phone to his Raspberry Pi. After whipping up an app — functionally a button widget — that sends the command to open the door over FCM, he set up the Pi in a storage locker near the garage door and was able to fish a cable with both ethernet and power to it. A script running on the Pi triggers the garage door opener when it receives the FCM message and — presto — open sesame.

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Servo-Controlled IoT Light Switches

January 17, 2017 by 27 Comments

The Internet of Things is fun to play with; there’s all manner of devices to automate and control remotely. It can be sketchy, though — make a mistake when coding your automatic plant watering system and you could flood your house. Make a mistake with a space heater and you could burn it down. Combine these risks with the fact that many people live in rental properties, and it can be a difficult proposition to bring the Internet of Things to your home.

[Suyash] came up with a way around this by building 3D printed light switch covers that add servo control. It’s a great solution that it doesn’t require the modification of any mains wiring, and interfaces with the standard switches in the normal way. It makes it a lot safer this way — there are municipal wiring codes for a reason. This is a great example of what you can do with a 3D printer, above and beyond printing out Yoda heads and keychains.

The backend of things is handled by the venerable ESP8266, with [Suyash]’s custom IoT library known as conduit doing the heavy lifting. The library is a way to quickly build IoT devices with web interfaces, and [Suyash] claims it’s possible to be blinking an LED from the cloud within 5 minutes using the tool.

For another take on an IoT light switch, check out this Hackaday Prize entry from 2016.

IoT-ify All Things: LG Has Gone Overboard

January 9, 2017 by 133 Comments

If you been following Hackaday lately, you’ve surely noticed an increased number of articles about IoT-ifying stuff. It’s a cool project to take something old (or new) and improve its connectivity, usually via WiFi, making it part of the Internet of Things. Several easy to use modules, in particular the ESP8266, are making a huge contribution to this trend. It’s satisfactory to see our homes with an ESP8266 in every light switch and outlet or to control our old stereo with our iPhone. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. And that’s completely fine for one’s personal projects.

But what happens when this becomes mainstream? When literally all our appliances are ‘connected’ in the near future? The implications might be a lot harder to predict than expected. The near future, it seems, starts now.

This year, at CES, LG Electronics (LG) has introduced Smart InstaView™, a refrigerator that’s powered by webOS smart platform and integrated with Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service.

… with webOS, consumers can also explore a host of WiFi-enabled features directly on the refrigerator, creating a streamlined and powerful food management system all housed directly on the front of the fridge door. Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service gives users access to an intelligent personal assistant that, in addition to searching recipes, can play music, place Prime-eligible orders from Amazon.com…

This is ‘just’ a fridge. There are other WiFi-enabled appliances by now, so what?  Apparently, during the LG press conference last Wednesday, the company marketing VP David VanderWaal said that from 2017 on, all of LG’s home appliances will feature “advanced Wi-Fi connectivity”.

Notice the word advanced, we wonder what that means? Will ‘advanced’ mean complicated? Mesh? Secure? Intelligent? Will our toaster finally break the Internet and ruin it for everyone by the end of the year? Will the other big players in the home appliances market jump in the WiFi wagon? We bet the answer is yes.

Here be dragons.

[via Ars Technica]

3D Printed Mini-Printer Enables Obsession With Lists

January 1, 2017 by 8 Comments

When going about a busy day, a hard copy listing all your tasks helps if you aren’t inclined to pull up a notepad — or whatever app you use — on your phone each time; doubly so if you want to pin it up in one place to refer to. Besides, using a full sheet of paper for a few items is impractical — and wasteful. To that end, [Jed Hodson] has concocted a mini printer for all your listing needs.

[Hodson] designed and 3D printed the case, making the files available for download and instructions on how to assemble it. Being an IoT device, the printer uses a Photon board to connect to the Internet, wherein Microsoft Flow is used to liaise between the Adafruit printer and Wunderlist — the list app [Hodson]’s chosen for this project.

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The Demise Of Pebble As A Platform

December 6, 2016 by 62 Comments

Despite owning five, including the original Pebble, I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about smart watches. Even so, the leaked news that Fitbit is buying Pebble for “a small amount” has me sort of depressed about the state of the wearables market. Because Pebble could have been a contender, although perhaps not for the reason you might guess.

Pebble is a pioneer of the wearables market, and launched its first smartwatch back in 2012, two years before the Apple Watch was announced. But after turning down an offer of $740 million by Citizen back in 2015, and despite cash injections from financing rounds and a recent $12.8 million Kickstarter, the company has struggled financially.

An offer of just $70 million earlier this year by Intel reflected Pebble’s reduced prospects, and the rumoured $30 to $40 million price being paid by Fitbit must be a disappointing outcome for a company that was riding high such a short time ago.

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A Rebel Alliance For Internet Of Things Standards

November 21, 2016 by 41 Comments

Back when the original Internet, the digital one, was being brought together there was a vicious standards war. The fallout from the war fundamentally underpins how we use the Internet today, and what’s surprising is that things didn’t work out how everyone expected. The rebel alliance won, and when it comes to standards, it turns out that’s a lot more common than you might think.

Looking back the history of the Internet could have been very different. In the mid eighties the OSI standards were the obvious choice. In 1988 the Department of Commerce issued a mandate that all computers purchased by government agencies should be OSI compatible starting from the middle of 1990, and yet two years later the battle was already over, and the OSI standards had already lost.

In fact by the early nineties the dominance of TCP/IP was almost complete. In January of 1991 the British academic backbone network, called JANET (which was based around X.25 colored book protocols), established a pilot project to host IP traffic on the network. Within ten months the IP traffic had exceeded the levels of X.25 traffic, and IP support became official in November.

“Twenty five years ago a much smaller crowd was fighting about open versus proprietary, and Internet versus OSI. In the end, ‘rough consensus and running code’ decided the matter: open won and Internet won,”

—Marshall Rose, chair of several IETF Working Groups during the period

This of course wasn’t the first standards battle, history is littered with innumerable standards that have won or lost. It also wasn’t the last the Internet was to see. By the mid noughties SOAP and XML were seen as the obvious way to build out the distributed services we all, at that point, already saw coming. Yet by the end of the decade SOAP and XML were in heavy retreat. RESTful services and JSON, far more lightweight and developer friendly than their heavyweight counterparts, had won.

“JSON appeared at a time when developers felt drowned by misguided overcomplicated XML-based web services, and JSON let them just get the job done,”

“Because it came from JavaScript, and pretty much anybody could do it, JSON was free of XML’s fondness for design by committee. It also looked more familiar to programmers.”

—Simon St. Laurent, content manager at LinkedIn and O’Reilly author

Yet, depending on which standards body you want to listen to, ECMA or the IETF, JSON only became a standard in 2013, or 2014, respectively and while the IETF RFC talks about semantics and security, the ECMA standard covers only the syntax. Despite that it’s unlikely many people have actually read the standards, and this includes the developers using the standard and even those implementing the libraries those developers depend on.

We have reached the point where standardization bodies no longer create standards, they formalize them, and the way we build the Internet of Things is going to be fundamentally influenced by that new reality.

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Jenkins And Slack Report Build Failure! Light The Beacons!

November 19, 2016 by 10 Comments

When you have a large software development team working on a project, monitoring the build server is an important part of the process. When a message comes in from your build servers, you need to take time away from what you’re doing to make sure the build’s not broken and, if it’s broken because of something you did, you have to stop what you’re doing, start fixing it and let people know that you’re on it.

[ridingintraffic]’s team uses Jenkins to automatically build their project and if there’s a problem, it sends a message to a Slack channel. This means the team needs to be monitoring the Slack channel, which can lead to some delays. [ridingintraffic] wanted immediate knowledge of a build problem, so with some software, IoT hardware, and a rotating hazard warning light, the team now gets a visible message that there’s a build problem.

An Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board is used as the controller, connected to some RF controlled power outlets via a 434MHz radio module. To prototype the system, [ridingintraffic] used an Arduino hooked up to one of the RF modules to sniff out the codes for turning the power outlets on and off from their remotes. With the codes in hand, work on the Huzzah board began.

An MQTT broker is used to let the Huzzah know when there’s been a build failure. If there is, the Huzzah turns the light beacon on via the power outlets. A bot running on the Slack channel listens for a message from one of the developers saying that problem is being worked on, and when it gets it, it sends the MQTT broker a message to turn the beacon off.

There’s also some separation between the internal network, the Huzzahs, and the Slack server on the internet, and [ridingintraffic] goes over the methods used to communicate between the layers in a more detailed blog post. Now, the developers in [ridingintraffic]’s office don’t need to be glued to the Slack channel, they will not miss the beacon when it signals to start panicking!