Category Archives: Uncategorized

DDD East Anglia Ticket Competition. Get your #DDDEA On!

Tinamous has been sponsoring DDD East Anglia since it started and we’re immensely proud to be able to help the event happen. If you’ve not been to a DDD event you’re missing out on some amazing community events.  They happen all over the UK, so be sure to check out one near you.
Just like in previous years, the tickets for this free event sold out in the blink of an eye.  As a sponsor, Tinamous receives a number of free tickets and we’re giving them away!
Here’s your chance to win 1 of 4 DDD East Anglia Tickets…
 
Tinamous is all about getting things onto the internet and building your own Internet of Things. We make it really easy to get data from and interact with internet connected devices such as the Particle Core,  Photon, Arduino’s and Raspberry Pis.
We would like to know what ‘things’ you would like to see connected to the internet. Give the maker community ideas for ‘things’ they could make which would be useful when internet connected.
How to Enter:
 
Tweet the ‘thing’ you would like to get connected. Be sure to include the #GetYourThingOn hash tag.
Example Tweet:
Tips:
  • Avoid the obvious and already connected. No prizes for fridge, smoke alarm, thermostat etc. They’ve all been done.
  • Prizes will be awarded based on usefulness and originality.
  • Feel free to add your reasoning (e.g. in a second/third tweet or blog post), especially if it’s not obvious.  (This is not required for entrance to the competition.)
  • Feel free to include #Tinamous or #IoT, if you like and have room left in the tweet, but again, these are not a requirement.
The rules are simple.
  • Entrance is via a tweet posted on Twitter.com as described above.
  • The tweet MUST include the hashtag #GetYourThingOn
  • There will be only 4 Winners.
  • Tickets will be awarded on Saturday, 19 September 2015 so be quick!
  • Notification of winners will be via Twitter.
  • Tickets are for DDD East Anglia on Saturday, 26 September 2015 in Cambridge.
  • The prize is the ticket only. Transportation and other expenses are not included.
  • Judging will be by myself, (@TinamousSteve).
  • The judge’s decision is final.
  • Ticket has no monetary value.

My DDD East Anglia Presentation : A brief introduction to making your own (Internet of Things) Thing

A few months ago (I know, I’m really slow at blogging!) I gave a presentation at DDD EastAnglia on how to make your own Internet of Things Thing. Here are my slides from the talk:

http://www.slideshare.net/TinamousSteve/a-brief-introduction-to-making-your-own-internet-of-things-thing

The Gadgeteer code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/Tinamous/GardenSprinkler

The NeoPixel rings I used in the SteamPunk goggles are available from AdaFruit at http://www.adafruit.com/product/1463 and the Arduino code is a slight modification of the example code that AdaFruit make available for the NeoPixels on GitHub

 

IoT Bingo Cards

Have you noticed all the hype around IoT? So many buzz words like Big Data, Machine Learning and so on. If you go to an IoT conference why not print out of the bingo cards from the attached and see how well you do.

In other news, be sure to bring one to the Internet of Things Day in Oslo, I’m on at 1:30 in Room 3 talking about how a simple IoT solution is driving sales and empowering the customer from a consulting project I’ve been working on.

IoTBingo

Print out one of the cards in the attached PDF and if you get a BINGO run I’ll give you one of the cool Tinamous.com triple function pens (but I won’t have many so be quick!)

IoT Hype Bingo Cards

See you at DDD North 2013

We are excited to be sponsoring DDD North this year, myself and Gill will be demonstrating Tinamous with an internet connected* Fez Spider Gadgeteer, some x-mas tree lights, RFID cards, temperature and humidity sensors and the press of button.

We’ll are donating two Fez Spider starter kits which are being given away to DDD North attendees as part of the swag (although you may have to attend the Gadgeteer/Netduino talks and submit feedback to the speakers to be in the running for them).

We are also putting some beer tokens behind the bar for the geek dinner, hope you can make it along to enjoy a beer with us at the end of what should be a really interesting day!

If you want to find out more about Tinamous, chat about all things IoT, or pick up some funky Tinamous/IoT stickers come along to our booth at DDD North – you can’t miss us we’ll be the ones with the big purple Tinamous monster on our T-Shirts!

* – Here’s hoping I’ve not cursed our demo, WiFi internet at conferences tends to be a bit touchy at the best of times!

The world is going all IoT!

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding at a massive pace, more and more devices are getting internet enabled and they all need a home.

Sites like Twitter have proved how powerful communication is even with only 140 characters, however you probably wont want your fridge, freezer and weather station all sending reports to Twitter and them getting merged into the mass of tweets flowing past you eyes and out there for everyone to see.

Internet based devices tend to report data, such as the temperature of your fridge, if the power has failed, the current light level and sites like Twitter don’t support measurements, other sites that do support measurements lack microblogging status messages and a Twitter style interface, so Tinamous is designed to bring these worlds together, a Twitter-like interface supporting measurements and alerts as well as status posts.

With Tinamous we bring the world of simple short communications together with devices measurements and alerting to provide a private dashboard of all your devices, at a quick glance you can see a history of status posts and measurements.

It’s got an Arduino, Netduino, Gadgeteer and generally micro friendly Api. We know that these devices have seriously limited capabilities. Trying to set-up OAuth, or HTTPS on them can be very difficult, if not impossible so our api is designed with them in mind.

Which is really just to say, hello and welcome to Tinamous and the Tinamous blog!