Musings on the Internet of Things

Written by Trent Sterling

IoT is the Wild West. Standards and frameworks are being developed by big companies- and adoption will determine the winner.

My goal in researching IoT was pretty simple. Wifi Toast. An RGB lightbulb. A keyfinder. A security system. Most of your typical IoT Hello World type projects.

Wood, Acrylic, and some LEDs!

But this opened my eyes to Microcontrollers vs Microprocessors, signal processing, electromagnetism, and the speed of light. Analog still has some uses too.

Robot Farmers

Honestly, I think I want to focus on robotics. Until I can afford more stepper motors and servos, I’ll have to keep the human element in my projects.

Iron Dude

Tony Stark made an Iron Man suit with a box of scraps! In a cave!

Sure, it’s a movie - but these days - you could imagine such a thing being reality.

So hip!

Augmented Reality gives you a HUD. Sensitive microphone? Magic ears. RF communications. Eyes in the back of your head via camera. Got internet? Now you can see every camera in your house - or around the world.

Multiple sensor nodes? An ear in every device.

LEDs are hawt

Did I mention that LEDs make everything look pretty?

You’re a few weapons away from being a super hero now. Maybe you can’t fly, but you can hear all, see all, and taser the shit out of any combatants.

You are Robocop!

Not good enough? Buy a gun this is fucking America.

Oh, and that drone following you? He’s just following your GPS waypoints with a few other inputs to make the experience a bit smoother. He’s also recording everything so you can upload your own bad-ass-super-hero movie to YouTube after you go around the yard posing for weird cosplay selfies.

Your toast is done, sir.