At the Mobile Monday Amsterdam, which I co-organise, I did a short talk on how to build your own Internet of Things Thing, in a day. The technical process is explained in my blogpost from last year: called The MoMoMeter.
Since we videotape all our talks, it’s included here:
The slides:
More on the IOBridge I used can be found on their blog
Photo’s by Filip Bunkens.
For Mobile Monday which I co-organise, I built a new Backchannel. Backchannels are a screen, next to thepresentation, where people in the audience can post their reactions. Our new backchannel includes posting by Twitter, SMS and photo’s via Mobypicture.
To post via Twitter, people had to include the hashtag #momo in their posts. The event was a big success, and #momo even made it to the trending topics on Twitter search!
I’m already talking to some other events, who want to use this to enhance audience participation.
Photo’s by van Maanen
Yesterday the team of Mobile Monday went to Protospace, to play with their devices in their lab. They have a big lasercutter, different computer driven milling machines, and a 3D printer. We had a tour of the lab, and went over all the machines. For example, I never realised there are shapes that can only be generated by printing them on a 3D printer.
As project for the day we decided to build a device that would respond to input from Twitter. We wanted to build something that could respond to input by the audience, and we could use at our events.
We used one of the first IObridge devices. They are a nice box you connect to the internet, hook up with sensors and actuators, and then controll via their API’s. At first I wasn’t too happy with their API: I was planning to controll the Iobridge from PHP running on a server. Unfortunatally, for now they only offer an (obfuscated) Javascript API. But IObridge was quick to reach out on Twitter and gave me alpha access to their data API. However at that point most allready worked with Javascript.
We built a meter (see first image) with a needle that moves, comparing the number of tweets for 2 different keywords, based on the Twitter Search API. It checks every 5 seconds for new tweets containing terms, calculates the new value, and updates the needle.
The board, needle and stand were cut with their lasercutting, including the nice gradient. It works beautifully, and we allready got good responses on the live stream. We’ll probably show it on one of the next Momo’s.
Geek note: If you include their Javascript widget you can use
widgetSetString('WIDGETID',to);
to set the widget to a new value)
Movie of the apple being burnt can be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcfonteijn/3201488272/
Mobile Monday Amsterdam is one of the nicest, busiest and buzziest events I know. And from now on, I’ll be part of the organising team! I quite look forward to making Momo even better! See you on Monday!