Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Things and the Internet: Eric Jennings & Sally Carson, Pinoccio”.
About a year ago, a little over a year ago, i was uh at my home and um the house next door to us became vacant and uh. What happened there on was a very interesting story which led to where we’re at today on the stage um, the the house, next door became foreclosed and uh. What happened is a couple weeks later someone moved in and we figured maybe the landlord or the the bank who owned the house. Now actually has someone else move in and it’s paying rent and then soon after that, we realized no they’re, actually not paying rent and they’re squatting um. Furthermore, they’re doing clearly illegal things right next door to where we live, and this is where my kids and my wife live and as well, and so here i am in this position thinking now.
What do we do with this like? I have and we’re working i’m working in san francisco at the time living in reno, nevada and uh commuting and trying to figure out i’m leaving in two days to work again, and you know that we contacted law enforcement, they say well, let us know when they’re Back they come at weird times of the day and night and we’ll take care of it. So i’m thinking, okay, i can go over to the window every five minutes and check to see when they’re there or being the geek that i am there’s got to be some piece of technology here that i can actually automate this. So i um i, i pull out arduino uno, of course, because that’s the first thing i go to when i think about things like this. I have a passive infrared sensor.
I have a wi-fi shield and i’m thinking, okay, i’m going to have this thing. Tweet me. Whenever someone walks by this fence, it just so happened that the fence between our houses had this knot hole about this big, which is just about the same size as the pass infrared sensor. So i was able to jimmy up a you know, a a bunch of brackets and i got there brought over the extension cord plugged it in and for that weekend before i left i’m hacking network protocol code.
I’M trying to get my code to actually post the twitter api and i’m thinking in my mind it’s 2012 and we’re still doing this like. Why am i writing this right now? This is this is silly and so um what we started doing at that point is um uh long story short, the squatters are gone now, so one way or another, the technology took care of it, but um what we. What we ran into in that point is that why what what can we build with this? This is actually interesting.
We started talking to people like there’s a problem here. Arduino has done such a fantastic job of bringing electronics hardware to people who are perhaps not electrical engineers or software engineers. They brought it there, but it’s like there’s this last mile of like getting to the web and connecting the things together. That wasn’t done yet like what can we help to build in this situation, and this pain point that we had that can help other people actually have this platform uh all the way up to the web. What we call the last mile, even the last inch from physical to the virtual and so uh, so we realized at that point that we’re actually talking more about a platform at this point than a product like.
Are we going to go and make like a squatter sensor? You know vertical and kickstart it. No there’s something bigger here, so uh, so we ended up. Doing is stepping back for a second and um and talking about how to do this correctly, how to take the best things that we learned from the web and from what arduino and some other companies have done and and extend kind of push the state of the Art forward a little bit so this is here we go. This is pinocchio.
This is where we landed today. So this is a wireless battery powered microcontroller arduino compatible, but has a mesh radio? You see a little chip antenna on the front there. This particular picture has a wi-fi module as well, so it bridges up to the web and uh and we um are super excited about it, because it’s really bringing networked aspects of what we loved about arduino and these other platforms to now.
Uh to to all the projects we wanted to do, but we were hacking network protocol code enough too, all right. So i i stood up to get miked and i apparently sat in coffee and i was freaking out and now i’m trying to not get the giggles, because it’s it’s perfect. I have a way of like spilling things on myself at critical moments in my life, so there you go um, stay away from row, two aisle seat; okay, so yeah we had this hypothesis.
We were forming we’re having a hard time connecting hardware to the web. We have this hunch that other people are wrestling with the same issue, but we didn’t want to create a solution in search or uh yeah solution in search of a problem. So eric and i both come from the web, and we want to apply a lot of the methodologies that we use in web-based product development in this world of hardware, hacking and the internet of things. So is this a scratch your own itch project? Is it a product? Is it a business like these were some of the questions that we had about a year ago when eric attended the same conference, i think he probably met some of you here. He added a folded up sheet of paper with the eagle schematic, um printed on it. We tried to find it to bring back, but we couldn’t find it um, let’s see so applying methods that we learned from the web.
What does that mean for any designers out there come on um? Are there any designers here? Are there any user experience designers or some there’s some? Yes, okay cool, so you guys have seen these slides a thousand times at every design conference um desire lines. So architects do their best. You know job of trying to predict what the usage patterns are going to be in a space like this and create sidewalks.
You know often at 90 degree angles, and the first thing that you see in a square plot of land is a desire line. One of these worn out paths of grass at a 45 degree angle through the middle of the plot. There’S some right outside of this space, and what does that show us? It’S like a hack in a way, it’s a work around it’s showing that it needs not being met and there’s an actual pattern of usage or behavior. That’S different from what the original intention was. So that’s what we call that in in software development, you know you, these paths emerge, people are showing you how they want to use a product and then from there you can start to build a rich feature set around what you’ve observed to be the actual usage Patterns, so you know we went to conferences like this one, i think. In september we went to the open source hardware workshop, open source hardware workshop in uh new york, and we talked to makers.
We wanted to find out. Do people in fact want to connect their hardware to the web as we thought? What tools are they using right now to try to do this? Where are they getting stuck? Where are their problems where their hacks, where their work workarounds trying to find those cow paths that we can pave? And i think what we found was you know for nerds like us like they did want to connect their projects to the web, and i think a big part of what we’re trying to do with pinocchio is just to infuse that, from the in the platform from The beginning, so you take the board out of the box, switch it on quick configuration and it’s talking wirelessly to the web immediately um. We want to demonstrate that all the plumbing’s there so that you start to focus on like the specifics of what you’re interested in building your your kegerator or your quadcopter.
So not only did we apply methods, methodologies that we use in in web-based development, but we also applied themes and i’m sure a lot of these are going to be familiar to you guys here in this audience, some of you like coin these terms, which is it’s Cool to be talking about it here, um emergent behavior, so i read a book early in my career called emergence by stephen johnson and he he’s talking about um areas where you see emergent: behavior social insects, ants bees, cities neurons and on the web software. So what does emergent behavior mean sorry, i’m trying to get there. We go um, it’s bottom up versus top down, so we’re trying to create um taxonomies that are emergent. Instead of coming with a very dictatorial style, we want to see what patterns of behavior emerge. Naturally, if, but by creating like a very extensible system for creation, we can just see what kinds of behavior emerge naturally, and that speaks to this whole concept of participation versus consumption. There was a you know.
There was kind of this turning point in the web where we went from all just like 2005, like web 2.0, was very much about this change from you know, just going to somewhat static sites where you can consume content read to you, know, new tools and platforms For creating content yourself, you know blogging and uh. You know becoming an active participant in the creation of the web as opposed to a consumer of content, and that’s very much like the ethos that we’re trying to breathe into pinocchio. We want it to be a platform for creation, and what that means is you know, i’m very much inspired by biology. I’D i’d like to see a long tale of the internet of things. I think there’s niche applications that we, you know certainly eric and i haven’t thought of yet um, i’m interested in using pinocchio in my own ways and beekeeping and bike computers and that type of thing. But we want to have a diversity of ideas.
A diversity of usage emerge, as opposed to like a monoculture, a dictatorial you know, top-down use, cases that we’re pre-defining. Oh, i overshot it. Well, the last one was you know: how do we do? That is that you at the same time? Okay, no, sorry um! So yeah relinquish control. I want to control it yeah, ironically so uh. So how do we do that? We relinquish control and on the web? That means um for web 2.0. It meant relinquishing control of data like opening up apis, letting people create mashups so that you could see new usage emerge, that’s unexpected and perhaps more interesting, a whole greater than the sum of its parts um. It also means relinquishing control of so it’s not only usage but data. We have this concept of, like you own your own data, we’re not owners of it.
There’S this whole software component that we’re building out on pinocchio, and we want to be good stewards of that and build a useful layer, much like github, where it’s we’re providing useful tools to interact with your own data. But it’s essentially still yours, we’re not hijacking your data and selling it back to you. So as technologists, it’s uh, it’s scary as hell to relinquish control. We like to control the chaos of the world around us engineers like to understand things, fix them and then make them done, and so it’s it kind of goes against a lot of natural concepts that i have in my mind around how to build this correctly and So um, how this is played out is that without going too deep in the technology that we’re using for pinocchio is that we have aspects of this relinquishing of control built into the very core of pinocchio um. When you build a networked device, the product is more than just the hardware. It’S also the software, it’s also the network. It’S also how it plays into the bigger world like how does it? What are the interfaces that this bubble of software and hardware has with other systems other apis like the twitter example like? Where? What does that look like that’s part of the product? Still it’s not just cool.
I got this wireless device, it shoots out, radio frequency and receives it, and so one choice we’ve made early on is to try specifically not to define a single protocol or api to use. Pinocchio and um we’ve been contacted by several people who are like. Will you help us design this protocol for the internet of things and i’m not even sure what that means? I don’t know what questions to ask to answer that question. I’M not sure there is one or there should be one. It goes against the concept of emergent behavior.
If i knew what it was that that’s all sorts of presumptuous, you know mindset that i obviously know what the future is going to be like and how it should be laid out or sally knows how to design it. On that side, we don’t. We have no idea. The web didn’t do that in in the early 2000s in 1990s as well.
You had prodigy and compuserve and – and those are these really strange – wild gardens that you thought that was the internet in the aol. And then you went to web 2.0 and you had rss speech you’re like great. I can just subscribe to whatever i want and then here we are again starting to feel a little bit like compuserve and prodigy and facebook and twitter and stuff like that. So, how do we let the things emerge like web 2.0 happened in the internet of things and so um in in pinocchio.
The network stack there’s this kind of a message: bus. If you will it’s this this, this concept of you can think of is like a telephone line. Each pinocchio can publish up to it and it also subscribed from from various channels. So we like to use the uh the description of of uh ordering a pizza.
The web works a lot of ways with your web browser. You request a url and it comes back to you on your browser, renders the page and you get to see it. That’S what we call request response and software engineering. It’S a design pattern, that’s very common! There’S another design pattern called publish subscribe, which you instead of requesting something you say.
Let me know when something happens on this channel or on this topic: we’re using a published, subscribe model in pinocchio, and it’s opened up all these use cases that were really hard, especially for low power battery devices. So, for the for the description we like to give is: there’s like a pizza, you want to order and um you uh you. If you called up and said i wan na order, a pizza, it’s like cool and you call up a minute later. Is the pizza ready, yet no okay, i call it again.
Is pizza ready yet no like there’s all that transaction, all that stuff happening um, so what the better model is. Is why don’t you call me when the pizza is ready and then i will come and get it at that point? So i only get one more phone call if you think of that, in the context of radio frequency and battery usage like it’s much more efficient, and so that’s an emergent behavior like let me know, and what what’s going to what’s going to come in on that Message when the phone call comes in, don’t know we don’t know what it’s going to be. We don’t want to decide that for everybody we want to have this platform that actually allows the democratization of the internet of things to happen from you all. We just want to actually build a plumbing and get it out of the way, because it’s really a pain in the ass right now to deal with when you’re trying to sense for squatters. If you’re going to build a homebrew automation, system or you’re going to do. Quadcopters and swarm robotics, and all these other things that people keep talking to us about.
We challenge all of you to really think about letting go of the need to control. You know the internet of things. We need to control the protocols. We do need some standardization, but really trust the emergence of all that is actually going to. Can. You know, lead to a better product for everyone and a future that none of us can actually see yet thanks. So much .