Open Source Data Visualization on Open Source Hardware

There are two major trends happening in the hardware space today.  The first is that most hardware is becoming a commodity.  With commoditization comes significant decrease in costs – trending to zero cost.  The second is that hardware in general is becoming more pervasive and connected with every passing year.  As an example, there’s an estimated 45+ million iPhones out there, and that’s still well below the industry average of one-billion units (e.g Nokia, Windows Mobile).

These two trends are bringing about a change in how the physical world interacts with the digital world – generally referred to as ubiquitous computing (also pervasive computing, the Internet of things, or simply “everyware”).  Imagine a refrigerator that knows about the items it contains via RFID tagging.  Then extend that to the Internet and via a recipe web service you have a machine that can recommend a menu for you.  Connected via wireless to your scale, and it could further automatically customize your diet for your weight goals.

The only problem then is how do you, the open source developer, leverage this convergence?  If you’re a web developer, contributing to the numbers above by creating more content, then electronics hardware probably seems like a completely foreign world.

This session will begin by exploring electronic hardware basics with the open source prototyping platform, Arduino.  We will explore basic sensors such as light and temperature, and then take a look at wireless integration.  Once we have access to this abundance of real-time sensor data, we will want to display it.  Using the charting components from the open source Adobe Flex SDK, we will be able to display this data in near real-time, despite being a web deployment that generally lives in a page refresh world.