Brainstorming a New Take on an Old Idea

I couldn’t sleep this morning, and when I can’t sleep I tend to think. Over the last little while my thoughts have been on the Spark Core and ideas of things I want to control. In my random thoughts last night I had an idea.

While looking through the project plans people have posted I’ve seen a LOT of what basically equate to wifi sensors. That’s basically what I’ll be doing with my first one as well. What if the Spark team took advantage of this and created a series of spark wifi accessories that could be directly accessed by the Cloud APIs that are already in place. For example, I’d love to put multiple Temperature / Humidity sensors around my house that could all be addressed as simply as the Core can using the APIs. I could buy a bunch of Cores and wire them up, OR I could save a little money and buy Wifi enabled Temp / Humidity sensors from Spark for a little cheaper and just call them using the same APIs. Maybe my Core will change the color of a LED strip and send me a message if one of those sensors goes beyond a certain range. Maybe I have a motion sensor or light sensor that I can place anywhere that can wirelessly interact with my Core and the web though the API’s you already have in place.

Maybe I’m the only one that would like such a thing, maybe it wouldn’t be profitable, I really don’t know. What do you guys think?

Check out http://openremote.com, http://iobase.com, http://www.z-wave.com/

I’m interested in this area also and was thinking of setting up a simple service in the cloud so that it’s easy to plug in various sensors to a number of sparks and have them monitored and reacted to (alarms, actuators etc…)

I’m sure a lot of this already exists today, particularly with home automation, but it all seems to be quite inaccessible/incomprehensible to the causal onlooker.

My work on the brewpi project has me getting spark for use there with remote sensing and temp control, and we are about to revamp all the software - make it more open-ended, yet hopefully still simple to pick up.

PS: I don’t want to burst your bubble, but I’m sure you see that this isn’t really a new idea. Maybe you can change the title of this thread so people don’t get all excited! :slight_smile:

I’m familiar with Z-wave, SmartThings, Insteon, etc. I realize the concept isn’t new, but what I’d like to see is something produced by the Spark team and supported in this community. If Spark was to create something like this the implementation would be much more fluid because the components are all part of the same cloud. Maybe I’m being unrealistic. I know that Spark has already said they will be working with SmartThings to enable cloud to cloud communication.

I’ll have to do some research into Brewpi, that looks to be something I’d be interested in!

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I think my next Spark project (when I get my replacement Core in) will be to get something similar working on an nRF24L01+ network with the :spark: acting as a gateway. The other sensors would be simple “Bareduino” setups with their own nRF24L01+ chips listening for instructions from their :spark: overlord.

That sounds awesome @wgbartley. I’d love to do something similar. When we both get our :spark: I’d love to work with you on something like that.

@shocku992 appreciate the suggestion, although at least for the time being, this sounds like a great community project. We’re pretty busy improving the functionality of the :spark: Core/Cloud, and when it comes to extending the infrastructure into cool applications - that’s where you guys come in :smile: