Internet of Thingies

The Internet of Things has become something huge that has taken the imagination of many, for better or worse.  I am interested at the component level: how Thingies can be built cheaply and effectively, how they can be made to communicate openly through standards, and the interesting work and information these Thingies can provide.

My belief is that by using an open approach to making Thingies and using freely available standards, protocols, and mechanisms, we can make spectacularly interesting things, share ideas, and make the world a better place.  Or at least a more interesting place. How's that for huge?

Enough philosophy.  I will show my process for making, testing, tinkering, breaking, remaking, modifying, adjusting, interacting, collecting, and putting Thingies to use.  Using common tools and hobbiest electronic components I will show my approach and decision process, lessons learned and ideas to refine and improve in the future.  

I also happen to work for an enterprise-grade open source network management platform project maintainer, The OpenNMS Group, so I will use OpenNMS to collect and present collected data from these Thingies.  I will explore different data collection approaches, make use of pull and push collection methods, and cover ways to handle events and make use of alerting and thresholding.  

Technologies involved will range from TCP/IP to Lua, XML, HTTP, Heka, electricity, IDEs, Arduino and other similar hardware, and some Linux systems involvement too.