Less talk and more make - jumping onto the IoT bus

I'm a habitual tinkerer and always have been. At high school, rather than writing out 50 lines handed down to me by my maths teacher - I wrote a program to blast out few hundered of them with a C64 and dot matrix printer. It probably took me a lot longer to write the program, but it got a few laughs and yes, the teacher accepted them.

The number 8 wire mentality is a habit, and though I don't have much scottish ancestry I tend to try to make stuff myself rather than buying an off the shelf solution. Yes - I'm That Guy who has rigged the electric gate with it's own phone number so it can be controlled from afar, and kitted out the 10 year old central heating so that it logs its running pattern to a google spreadsheet and can switched on with an app on my phone.

The rise of the Maker Movement has made tinkering more socially acceptable, and the Internet of Things is supporting a revolutionary change that enables previously dumb devices to be connected and be more useful.

For many years I've been watching the rise of development platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, but though these things have been added to my online shopping basket many times I never managed to complete the checkout. Why is that?

Firstly, these platforms don't have easy wifi network connectivity out of the box which puts a limit on the applications that I have in mind for them. Secondly, both the platforms were just a bit too expensive to gamble that my limited copy/paste code writing skills would build something that works! However, the key downside is that to experiment and develop with these platforms always requires cables, a workshop and time, which are things I don't have right now.

Enter the Particle Photon

This little $19 USD device promised to be different - and within minutes of unboxing it, I had connected to my wifi and was using an app on my phone to flash a tidy LED on and off! So far so good!{the crowd goes wild, I drop the mic and investors are bashing down the door}

What makes this device so "cool" is that all the serious coding is done in a web browser and can be deployed to the device over the air. Not a cable or circuit board in sight. The data captured can be pushed straight into the cloud, and as you figure out what to do with that data, perhaps combine it with other online datasets, you can figure out how to act upon that data. That code and logic can be deployed ou can push out new functionality without going anywhere near the device.

A great match for Agile product development

The magic of the Particle platform is that it is hugely scaleable and offers an easy way to prototype products on a hackers' bench, deploy them into the field for testing, then scale them into mass production. All the while, new functionality can be developed and deployed.

The technical knowledge and financial investment required to build a working prototype, that adds value to a business is remarkably low... and a worthy tool for any Hackathon event.

So go ahead, take the plunge, and jump on the IoT bus!