CamJam has a lot to answer for; mainly the evaporation of my evenings this past week. During the jam I helped run the “Inventing with the Internet of Things” workshop, I had no idea what it was all about as it was a last minute thing but I know enough Python and the principles of networking to bumble along. The workshop was run by David Whale in conjunction with IoTic Labs

@whalegeek & @geeky_tim demonstrate the “Internet of Things”

The general gist of the workshop is that each Raspberry Pi was a “Thing” on the Internet. Pairing off, one Pi acted as a “sensor” and sent a message when a button was pressed. The other reacted to that message by lighting an LED and playing a sound. Over the course of the workshop the idea was to demonstrate an event happening (a door opened) and a reaction to that event occurring (an alarm sounded). Thus demonstrating what the IoT can/will evolve into.

The source from the workshop is available from the IoTic Labs github . Tell.py is the sensor, Reveal.py is the recipient of that sensor information.

Download, tweak and have fun. You can run both parts on your Pi, if you don’t have a PiBrella tweak the code to do something else (wait for input via raw_input(), or print a message on screen). Once you strip out the Pi specific code it will run on Python on any platform! Modify config.py and set the MY_COMPUTER variable to something unique to you. In my case it now reads

MY_COMPUTER = “ForToffee_Pi_” + str(MY_NUMBER)

When you’re ready hit up the next article for the Extension Task!