![]() ![]() ![]() When there are no alerts incoming, the Visualight acts just like any other lightbulb and glows white. The Visualight can be set to display any combination shade of Red, Green, and Blue that you can think of for your alerts, or can be turned on and off by these datafeeds or directly from your smartphone/tablet. Out of the box the Visualight system connects to data feeds from Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Weather Underground, the New York City’s MTA (subway & buses), NOAA Tide Predictions as well as any data feed available on COSM. ![]() ![]() Some of you might be familiar with Leif’s work as the creator of the social water quality monitoring project for the New York Harbor DontFlushMe, the Visualight project acts as an extension of that project and a part of his MFA thesis work done at Parsons New School. What if you could visualize data as colored light, and blend this functionality into your everday life? With some unfortunate timing being released after the blow up press for LIFX comes an open-source and functional WiFi lightbulb alternative from creator Leif Percifield called the Visualight. The complete project write-up and history can be found here. He is sharing the firmware, software and pictures of the project on his github account: and is actively looking for other developers to help him create a fully Open Source wireless scale system. Originally Jorge utilized two OpenSource Android programs for logging the weight data ( Weight Chart and Droid Weight) but has since created his own app on the market for the system called Smart Weight Chart. ARM LPC2103 microcontroller board: $15.6.The project is created using ($75 Estimate): For some additional motivation he enabled himself to track his progress over time online using an Android phone, a cheap bathroom scale (20€) and by adding Bluetooth connectivity to the scale. Jorge Pinto (Casainho) decided he wanted to lose some weight. Want to give it a shot? Spark made their connected thermostat design completely open-source, and you can grab the source code at Github. Nest’s partnership with Google undoubtedly places it at the top of the Internet of Things ladder - but there’s clearly a lot of room at the bottom, and Spark’s experiment proves just how easy it is to grab a handhold and start hoisting yourself up. The recent proliferation of cloud services, APIs, and small chips that integrate processors with wireless connectivity has made it relatively trivial for even low-budget tinkerers to develop powerful, innovative products. “In this process, we’ve come to respect the incredible technical challenges that Nest has solved while also coming to understand how much the game has changed since they first started,” Spark wrote. Spark spent only $70 to replicate the basic functions of the Nest - but they readily admit that, as a rough prototype, their version is nowhere near as polished. Other functions, like the ability to control the thermostat from a smartphone or provide a learning algorithm so it adjusts to usage patterns, were provided by the Spark Cloud service communicating with the prototype over wifi via a REST API. All Spark had to do was clip a few sensors and other components to a breadboard, use a CNC mill and laser cutter to carve out a wood and acrylic housing, and spend a few hours coding the firmware. “Nest had to spend millions of dollars on R&D to build the basic infrastructure behind the product,” the Spark team wrote in a blog post documenting their attempt to replicate Nest’s work in a single day. Rather, Spark wanted to show how easy it is to develop IoT products today, as a demonstration of how far the industry has come since Nest was founded in 2010. The point wasn’t to one-up Nest or to devalue the work that went into designing that company’s signature product. Using their own Spark Core and some off-the-shelf components, they built a prototype of a Nest-like smart thermostat in just a few hours. But the team at WiFi chip maker Spark, while praising Nest as “the first company to figure out what the ‘Internet of Things’ means to consumers and deliver products that people actually want,” took the announcement as something of a challenge. Many people hailed Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of connected thermostat maker Nest earlier this month as proof of the immense importance and value of the Internet of Things. ![]()
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