Web-Connected Light Sensors With Pachube & Arduino
Two of the more interesting products in the 'Internet of Things,' a.k.a. real world objects connected to the Internet, are Pachube and Arduino. We profiled Pachube (pronounced "patch-bay") in May; it's an open source platform enabling you to connect sensor data to the Web. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, which we briefly profiled in February. So far both services have spawned some geeky and quirky - and in truth not overly useful - trial apps. For example Pachube has been used to monitor house plants and a recent Arduino creation monitors a teapot's tea level. However this is not to undersell the potential of either service - it's just that both are currently in the experimental stage.
It's fun to look at what is being developed now, because it gives us a glimpse of the Internet of Things of the future. For example a site called The Daily Duino recently experimented with a project involving two light sensors.
Morgellon from The Daily Duino set up two light sensors in his room - one mounted on the wall and the other taped to a window (facing outside).
Morgellon explained why he did this:
"The idea is to compare inside light levels to outside light levels and adjust for energy consumption. If the light level outside is equal or greater than inside, then perhaps I should open the blinds to let in more light... or maybe even go outside... *gasp*
The two light sensors are connected to an Arduino running the Standard Firmata. The Arduino is connected to a PC running a Processing sketch that sends the sensor data to Pachube."
This is the kind of project that Pachube encourages, as it wants users to interact with sensor data and use it to actively engage with their environment. Morgellon's example is simple, but it illustrates the point: that web-connected sensors help him optimize his living environment. Here he is explaining the set-up, including showing his interactions with Pachube on an Android phone:
Pachube + Arduino from Morgellon on Vimeo.
Below are a couple of graphs generated from the sensor data on Pachube. The higher the number, the less light is present. The aim, according to Morgollon, is that "the Inside Light Sensor will stay a nice high number as I sleep [...] while the Outside Light Sensor should lower over the course of the day."
As the Internet of Things evolves, experiments like this show its potential. Maybe having your household lighting system hooked up to the Web for optimization and interaction is not too far away.
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Really inspiring. A frontier after mobile computing, but connected.
For myself, I'd love to have a sensor on my espresso machine to tell me when the boiler is ready. It would be cool for temperature surfing.
p.s. Open ID is a bit less work for me personally than FB Connect, and it's not a bad thing that it's the open option.
A few months back, I bought a Current Cost electricity meter, hacked that and started pushing the data up to Pachube and displaying real-time electricity usage. But, electricity is only one part of the picture – I also use gas for our heating and hot water systems, and I wanted to track our usage of this too. The catch, of course, is that there doesn’t appear to be a consumer product on the market to do this for me, and I really wanted an excuse to go out and buy an Arduino and start playing with short term loans. It is integrated as a Scripting tab in the Arduino IDE. Upon startup, a listing of your ruby script files is generated from your Sketchbook directory. Ruby scripting support is built into the Antipasto Arduino IDE in versions 0.8.11 or greater.
Wow, this is really cool stuff. It's hard for me to fully comprehend how this technology is able to interact with its surrounding environment, but it is definitely cool. Even though it doesn't really have anything to do with rug pads I can't imagine the full potential here.
Oh. It's really insping. Knowing that these devices are in the improvement stage, I suppose that they will help us in the future.