Are you tired of waiting for objects in your house to be available as connected to the Internet? I mean surely you want to be able to program your house to alert you of a flooded bathroom, or someone has arrived at your front door? Well, with Twine you can start building your own connected world.
MIT Media Lab alumni Supermechanical have built Twine – 2.5″ rubber square which connects to Wi-Fi and enables objects to communicate using SMS, Twitter, email and HTTP requests. A basic version of Twine can be had for a $99 contribution through Kickstarter, the well know crowdsourced funding platform. That gets you something that looks like a trendy bar of soap that happens to have on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. Power is supplied by the on-board mini USB or two AAA batteries. You can program Twine from the Spool web app using a very simple rules based system – stuff like “when vibration sensor moves, your cat is on the move”. Or something like that.
Seriously though, this is cool stuff and the project currently has over $100k of funding on Kickstarter. Additional sensors are available and as you plug them in to the onboard jack, they pop up in the web app as available to program. I’m off to spend $99
….thanks to Rob Wolf for the heads up and be sure to follow Supermechanical on Twitter
