With any luck this graph should show the temperature of our living room over the last day.
This one should be the power consumption of our whole house.
It’s a visualisation of the 24 hours before you loaded this page created with the sensor data coming from a Current Cost energy monitor connected to my Mac Mini and reporting to Pachube.
The easiest way to describe Pachube is to say it’s a bit like Flickr or YouTube but instead of being for photos or videos it’s designed for real time sensor data. That may not mean much to you now but very soon there will be lots of “smart objects” like Current Cost available that are embedded with microprocessors and the ability to create and share their data over a network. These could be as simple as a light switch reporting when its switched on or off to personal informatics storing your GPS co-ordinates and heart rate to your music player storing listening preferences or complex sensor arrays that monitor and store heat, light, movement, sound, speed and all manner of other data types.
Some of these smart objects I’m talking about might also be capable of reading the data generated by other smart objects on the network - which means they could then become capable of acting on it. You could link them together and create networks of really useful things. Maybe the light in your office turns off automatically when you lock the door. Maybe your telephone can tell your hi-fi to turn down when it rings.
Objects could be designed specifically as simple physical interfaces to complex digital systems. A great example of this is the Skål media player interface.
Some of these things could even connect to the internet, access data available online and act on it too. For example your heating system could adjust itself based on the local temperature feed from a weather website or an object could make sounds or light to tell you something based on the content of your Twitter stream or an RSS feed.
A nice, simple example of this is Availabot, which is a physical display of whether or not your friend is available on iChat.
So here’s the good bit. If you have objects that can send their data off to the internet, and objects that can read data off the internet you can, in theory, put them together to do really incredible stuff. You could get objects talking to other objects and carrying out physical actions hundreds or thousands of miles away.
As you can imagine there’s a lot of buzz around this stuff. It’s often referred to as “the internet of things” and it’s pretty much unavoidable.
This is where Pachube comes in. It lets you hook your smart objects up to the internet allowing them to deposit data or suck it up regardless of their location. It doesn’t really care what creates the data or what reads the data - it’s essentially a data broker and is going some way to solve the problem of a common language for any networked objects we create. It has potential to allow the conversation between these things to be one to one, many to one or one to many too. Remember they don’t have to be small. They could range in scale from tiny to huge - meaning we could even see buildings or cities that are capable of reacting to data from any number of other smart objects of indeterminate scale or location. Privacy issues aside you could create things that respond to the data generated by thousands of similar objects in places all over the world. You could even combine different data types to make physical “mash ups” of data.
It’s still really young. There’s homebrew kits like Arduino and Phidgets that act as programmable gateways between the digital and physical spaces, allowing you to build your own smart objects and people have definitely been doing some really cool stuff with them. There’s some great books out there too but I have to say it’s still all a bit nerdy and I’ve yet to see many people do anything genuinely useful with it (apart from maybe the highly amusing Botanicals project) but once people do come up with some killer applications for this kind of thinking - and they will - it’ll reach tipping point very quickly and it’ll be all over the place.
Personally I can’t wait to get involved working with stuff like this. I’ve started learning Processing (the language of Arduino) and intend to get stuck in as soon as I can.
