Becky surprised me with a gift. I unwrapped the Nintendo Switch in front of my family. I didn’t contain my joy. Memories of my brother and I playing the original NES flooded back to me. The Nintendo Switch is a portable and dockable game console. I have always had a soft spot for Mario, Zelda, Kirby, and Donkey Kong and the Switch has them all covered. My first order of business was signing up for Nintendo Switch Online and getting access to the library of NES games.
My happy place is playing Tecmo Bowl for the first time since 1989.
I recently gave a talk about people who take photos of PowerPoint presentations. I observed this behavior at a conference last year. Several people would take a photo of the PowerPoint slide. I imagine that they wanted to save the content to review later or to share with a colleague. This is me taking a photo of someone taking a photo of a PowerPoint slide.
I also noticed that during a keynote talk that I gave last year that no one took photos of my slides. Was I doing something wrong? Did I need something provocative on the slides?
Some slides have a lot of information on them. This slide from the Pentagon is the densest slide that I have ever seen.
I started thinking about how much data is contained on a normal PowerPoint slide. The average slide is about 150 KB. My Pixel 2 phone has a 12.2 MP camera. When I take a photo of a PowerPoint slide, I blow up the slide to 3,400 KB. That is a 22x multiplier of data.
No one is doing the studies, so I had to make up some stats. I assume that 2% of conference attendees take photos of slides.
“2% of all [conference] attendees take photos of PowerPoint slides.” – Hans Scharler
Let’s play that out. For every 1,000 attendees of a conference, 68,000 KB of data gets generated by one 150 KB PowerPoint slide. 24 million people went to a conference in the United States last year. Yikes. Almost all of us back up our photos to Google or iCloud. So, now we have photos of slides stored beside photos of kids, significant others, and vacations forever. We will need to build data centers just to store photos of PowerPoint slides.
If you are interested in seeing my slides from my talk, check out SlideShare.
It’s that time of year again… It’s time to show the person who you love how much you love them with an internet-connected gift. I got aggressively marketed to on Facebook to purchase something called the Lovebox. How did the Facebook algorithm know that I would be interested in an IoT device that displays messages? I got the Lovebox two days after I ordered here in the US shipped directly from France where the startup is based. The whole experience was excellent.
The Lovebox is an internet-connected device that displays messages that you write using their mobile app (for iOS and Android). Here’s what it looked like on my app. I got a flood of hearts on my screen when Becky acknowledged the receipt of my message.
The Lovebox rotates the heart on the front to tell the recipient that there is a message waiting. They open the lid to see the message. The device is sitting comfortably in my wife’s office. I love the idea of being able to send a notification to her without it being a text message.
The idea of the Lovebox is simple, but it is perfectly executed. I was quite impressed with the mobile app, the setup experience, and its utility. Love is all over every aspect of this device and system. Check it out on Lovebox.love. C’est si bon.
Back in 2007, Jason Winters and I started working on what would become ioBridge, RealTime.io, and ThingSpeak. The phrase “Internet of Things” got added to the discussion when Richard MacManus resurrected it from the RFID days in the late 90s and applied it to companies like ourselves in a 2009 article in the New York Times. Jason and I had experience with projects going viral such as a remote-controlled tractor with a webcam and an aquarium with real-time controls and monitoring. “Jason’s Fishcam” had sensors reporting temperature on a webpage and an interactive gator inside the aquarium. People used to watch the fish and control the gator mouth.
Jason’s Fishcam (January 2006)
The “Slashdot Effect” used to crush our homespun servers and render our projects useless for a period of time. Jason had the idea of moving the “control” part of our projects to the web. If all commands routed to and from a web server instead of going directly to a device, then we could control which commands went through, secure the connections using SSL, create access lists, and change things on the fly. This idea became our obsession for over a decade with several patents, licenses, open source projects, and customers from all over the world to show for the effort. We still work on large-scale IoT, Internet of Things for short, projects and have helped companies of all sizes reduce costs, predict equipment failures, and bring about connected products that serve a purpose.
“Twitter for Things” Demo App
When I first heard about Twitter back in 2006, I thought this is a perfect idea for things. Why would a human want to post short statues? Devices have a lot to say. “The HVAC system just turned on.” “The conveyor is drawing 3.1 amps.” “SYSTEM FAILURE: Code 87643.” If a web application could capture these messages, then the messages could be used for analysis. Jason and I started ioBridge in July of 2008 and built a scalable out-of-the-box solution plus a hardware dev kit. The only issue is that we only knew 30 people that were interested in the aquarium project. We sent an email to all 30 people and one person named Pete purchased a dev kit. He built a monitoring system for large aquariums in the Baltimore area. The next wave of users and customers didn’t come until Stephen Myers created an interactive pet treat dispenser for his dog. Stephen didn’t have an aquarium, but he did have a dog. Everything is a remix. Stephen blogged about his project on December 3, 2008, and his project got picked up by “The Unofficial Apple Weblog” since he used the iPhone as the controller.
iPhone Controlled Pet Treat Dispenser (December 2008)
To demonstrate the idea for a “Twitter for Things” to investors, I created @MyToaster – a Tweeting Toaster that used our system to send status updates about whether or not it was toasting. I followed Stephen’s idea and blogged about the toaster with my article, “Social Networking for My Toaster” on December 8, 2008, and described in detail how to build your own connected appliance. A few days later, Priya Ganapati picked up the story of MyToaster and wrote an article for Wired Magazine. This project and our company… took off.
First MyToaster Article in Wired Magazine (December 2008)
The toaster allowed me to start conversations with product manufacturers and designers that had ideas for new products. I worked on a number of consumer products and industrial systems that all use the same technology that Jason and I created. The Amazon Echo wouldn’t be possible if the Echo device had to understand all aspects of speech and user intents locally. The web allows Echo to tap into a huge data set that enhances its functionality. ThingSpeak is still going strong. You can still sign up today for a free, non-commercial account and join a community of over 350,000 developers around the world that are all learning about IoT and building new IoT applications.
ThingSpeak System Diagram (December 2010)
Fast forward 10 years, and we are still working on the same thing, but the things are now factories, agricultural systems, windmills, and space probes. I was really happy when Katie Blackley from Pittsburgh’s NPR New Station asked me for an interview and an update regarding the MyToaster that started my journey. It has been 10 years and the toaster still works. It is now outfitted with a Particle Photon and uses the ThingSpeak web service to update its thousands of followers. I am glad she reached out to me as it caused me to reflect a bit about the journey and prompted me to share my history of the Internet of Things.
Appendix: MyToaster
MyToaster has been popular on its own for a long time. I have gotten requests to talk about the toaster on news stations, interviews for magazines, and to have the toaster brought to IoT conferences. Every trade show we did had MyToaster on display. The “touring toaster” was a stand-in and took a lot of abuse over the years.
They listed that MyToaster from 2008 was a significant event that shaped “Connected Appliances” and “Consumer Internet of Things Products”.
2008 – @mytoaster joins Twitter. It’s a toaster that Tweets. Hans Scharler rigged up his toaster to his Twitter so the appliance Tweets one of two things: Toasting or Done Toasting.
A man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has rigged his toaster to tweet “Toasting” or “Done Toasting” with each use, and — despite the account’s lack of variety — has gained more than 2,000 followers.
In order to further connect us with our possessions, Scharler and his friend Jason Winters created a platform for developers called ThingSpeak— a sort of Twitter for things — that lets objects send messages, broadcast their location, graph their temperature, and more.
“Tweeting appliances speaks to this whole ‘internet of things’ idea,” says Hans Scharler, a tech consultant who also writes comedy material. “If your appliances were outputting information, it can always go to a database. But we love to share information. So why not find a way to do that?” Scharler found online fame for his twittering toaster, whose tweets alternate between “toasting” and “toast is done.” @mytoaster has about 200 twitter followers.
Yesterday, I was building an integration with IFTTT and my Philips Hue lights in my office. I wanted the Philips Hue lights to change to the latest CheerLights color. IFTTT offers a webhook as a trigger, so I decided to use MATLAB to trigger the webhook. MATLAB will get the latest CheerLights color, then send it to IFTTT and IFTTT sends the color to Philips Hue.
When I created the IFTTT webhook, IFTTT presented a CURL example:
curl -X POST -H “Content-Type: application/json” -d ‘{“value1″:”green”}’ https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/mwOffice/with/key/xxxyyyzzz
Here’s how to turn the CURL request into a MATLAB command:
As the story goes, Richard Launius designed a board game based on the Call of Chutulu RPG. Richard was not able to get time to play the RPG while raising his young family. He took matters in his own hand and created a game that he could play. He was able to pass the time and at the same time create a new era of board games. Games that were cooperative and still provided competition. Everyone in the Arkham Horror board game is fighting off insanity and encountering unmentionable horrors in a world inspired by H.P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The game took over 10 years for this to catch on in the mass market. Now, there are many Arkham Horry themed and styled games. You can now buy an updated version of Arkham Horror and expansions published by Fantasy Flight Games.
At the Buckeye Game Fest in 2015, I was able to meet and chat with the legendary game design. He was awesome and told me about the early days, mail order games, and reworking the original game to what it is now.
I recently got the change to give a ThingSpeak IoT demo at Boston TechJam. MathWorks is one of the sponsors so we got to participate with other tech companies and over 8,000 students and entrepreneurs from Boston. My demo used MATLAB to detect multiple faces from a live stream of video. The MATLAB analysis code sends the count to a ThingSpeak channel. I used the new ThingSpeak gauge widget to show how many people stopped and participated in the demo.
I have a lot of favorite times of the year. I get excited about the holidays, weekends, evenings, and days. I am usually filling each day with something new and/or pushing a project further along. One of my favorite events is the Bay Area Maker Faire. Imagine over 120,000 makers, hackers, builders, engineers, and students putting on the world’s biggest show-and-tell? You will see things that spark new ideas and you will see giant robotic giraffes.
You never know who you are going to run into. I was so happy to meet one of the first users of ThingSpeak! This is Andy Leer of Leer Media. Andy was introduced to my IoT projects back in 2008 at Hack Pittsburgh! He was instrumental in me being able to kickstart my startup and help support my growing community. Andy provided meeting space for my IoT Meetup in Pittsburgh.
A couple of the Mythbusters also showed up at the Bay Area Maker Faire. I got to talk about MathWorks software with both Adam Savage and Grant Imahara. Grant remembers using MATLAB quite a bit in his education and later his engineering projects.
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I have been getting ready for this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire. Stop by the MathWorks booth to see our latest hardware projects and demos. We have giveaways and info on the latest products. See you soon at the Maker Faire!
I love bins. I love sorted electronics parts and tools. I love matching bins.
After I sorted everything in my workshop, I wondered what I should do with my label maker. I printed a “label maker” label with my label maker and put it in a bin.
I really love building communities. And, I really, really love tabletop games. After moving to a new area for my technology career, I wondered how I could meet other game designers, publishers, and playtesters. After reading Mike Selinker’s book, Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, I decided to create a game design workshop using the book as its basis. A lot has changed since the book was first published – Kickstarter, legacy-style games, and Kickstarter – to name a few. My workshop fills in the gaps with hands-on exercises and discussion using the very latest research and references. The workshop is live and in-person which I really like for board games since they exist in the physical dimension.
Through some mutual contacts, I got introduced to Eduardo Baraf’s work. Edo has built a community on YouTube and is always putting out fresh content. He is also publishing some really high-quality games and supporting a large community of backers on Kickstarter with Pencil First Games. We started talking about his efforts and my projects, and Edo decided to have me on his YouTube channel, Gaming with Edo. It was a blast and an honor to be a part of his show. My episode is called, Q&A: Hans Scharler – Game Design Workshops.
Thanks for having me on, Edo. I look forward to your new game and video releases.
