This is a good one1. This guy has hacked the amazon dash button to use it for his own internet of things purposes, in this case logging when his baby wakes up in the night...
Amazon dash buttons are their new tech1, the one that looked like an april fool. You can buy a button from them that you stick to say your washing machine, then whenever you click the button it will order you some more washing powder or whatever...
Unfortunately it's USA only at the moment I think, but it would be nice to get some of these to have a play with. That's a neat little unit for only $5, you would struggle to recreate that nice form factor buying your own components - look at the photon for example2, it's ace, but tis' 27 at the time of writing.
If I had the time + money + motivation I'd be all over these...
Now there's a nodejs library3 for this too.
I'm having all sorts of home automation issues at the moment. Another of my lightwaverf double sockets has failed, so I can't turn the play room media server on right now. Going to dig into that tonight, "hopefully" there is just a loose connection. Also batteries have run out on two of my pirs so my automatic hallway lights are off. Then I think the new router from plusnet is not as good as the old one, so my connectivity in the house is a lot worse than it was. Possibly I have a conflict among my raspberry pis (raspberries pi?) so not all my devices are connected at the same time; I noticed this when I started monitoring my home brew again this week. Constant restarting of these little servers is sorting it out for now, but it's not ideal.
Node: Js (programming language of the web) on the server side.
raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town. Wed to Clare and dad to two, I am a full stack web developr, and I do mostly javascript / nodejs, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, + time travel.