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How To Start With Internet of Things #IoTFriday

Welcome to the new edition of IoTFriday at thethings.iO. A lot of people have ask us how to get started with the Internet of Things. Today I would like to talk about what you can learn or do to get into the IoT. It depends on what you do, ideas you have and what you want to learn. Enjoy the new #IoTFriday video.

During this #IoTFriday, we proposed 3 different situations depending on if you are a designer, a programmer, or a business man with a lot of amazing ideas.

If you are a designer our suggestions are to design something useful that solves a problem in your daily life. After that, print your design with a 3D printer. Finally, learn how to code to continue working on your solution.

 

If you are a developer our first suggestion is first to buy electronics such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi or Intel Edison and begin the coding process. Learn how these IoT platforms work;  it’s quite simple and the most important part is to have fun programming things. Finally, developers always need to meet a designer.

If you are a business person, create a nice idea and think of the best way to scale it. If you have a business idea related with the Internet of Things that scales, meet with developers and designers to make it happen.

Feel free to write in the comment area below if you have any questions or comments! We will do our best to respond promptly. If you need to test our back-end solution, write us a message to thethings.iO.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday weekly blog!

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Xmas lights at theThingsiO #iotFriday

At thethings.iO, we have been working a lot during the last months. We have been connecting things from our first customers and being in involved in awesome projects. We have also had some time to do some internal projects:

 

You are probably wondering, what did I just watch? Well, we were able to connect the Christmas lights and our Twitter handle (@theThingsIO), so that every time someone mentions us on Twitter they blink. We connected them via an Intel Edinson that listens to thethings.iO process.

Developing the Xmas lights connected to @thethingsIO

Developing the Xmas lights connected to @thethingsIO

We would like to use this opportunity to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year for 2015

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Learn Electric Imp in 5 minutes #IoTFriday

Welcome at the new edition of the IoTFriday at thethings.iO. Today let me show you a quick overview about how to learn Electric Imp, in a little bit more than 5 minutes. With this quick introduction we show how to blink up the Electric Imp, what is Squirrel and how to program devices and agents. Enjoy!

BTW now you can connect Electric Imp with thethings.iO with the official library!

The main part of the Electric Imp platform are the Imps. The Imps are these tiny modules (some with SD card size if they are developers edition) with CPU, memory and WiFi plugged with electronics through a shield and the GPIOs for sensors and actuators.

To blink up the imps and connect them to the Internet, is needed to BlinkUp them with a patented system that flashes the Electric Imps through the mobile device display. That means, that the WiFi SSID and password is transmitted through blinks.

These imps are connected to the Electric Imp cloud through the WiFi, and every one has an agent running on the cloud that attends the events that affect the device.

Electric Imp SD card developer edition

Electric Imp SD card developer edition

The Web IDE from Electric Imp is simple but it works effectively. The console and the agents are running very well (usually). During next days we are going to publish theThings.IO Electric Imp libraries and code examples.

Sign up at thethings.iO and eel free to send us comments and feedback and even topics for the next IoTFriday

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Internet of Things at CES and MWC 2013

After two days at the Mobile World Congress 2013 and reading about CES 2013 at Las Vegas, we strongly believe the Internet of Things will be big in 2013.

CES 2013 at Las Vegas

One of our companions from , had a booth set up and they caught several people’s interest due to their Kickstarter campaign.

The Good Night Lamp at CES 2013 (by todbot at Flickr)

The Good Night Lamp at CES 2013 (by todbot at Flickr)

Experts says that Quantified Self has been the guest star at CES 2013 because they create a lot of expectations with HAPIFork, Fitbit, Jawbone and Withing among other interesting companies.

The Mobile World Congress 2013 at Barcelona

In our opinion, the star of this conference was the Internet connected coffee machines. With an unclear use of companies defended the product saying that people do not want to wait to have coffee prepared when they go to the machine. A coffee takes thirty seconds to one minute to prepare through a machine.

The Cisco coffee machine connected to the Internet

The Cisco coffee machine connected to the Internet

The engineering solution for coffee machines were very intriguing.

On the other hand, the stackable pieces of plastic are ready to send the real-time information to the Telefonica cloud servers.

Thinking things by Telefonica I+D

Thinking things by Telefonica I+D

At the SMA Connected Cities booth, Jordi Corominas was presenting Ecooltra, an electric motorbike connected to the Internet. The system lets the users rent a motorbike using their mobile devices. Then, they could use NFC to start the motorbike at the Ecooltra parkings.

We were very excited to have this opportunity to join in on this conference. We hope that thethings.iO will help users improve the ability to interact with their Internet connected objects through our dashboard.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter @thethingsIO and check out our weekly #IoTFriday Blogs!

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