How close are we to the world where everything in our lives is connected?
As internet-enabled devices spread, you’ll worry less about your car, home, and friends because you’ll be able to check up on them at the touch of a button.
This internet-enabled, real-time gas sensor project demo was recently posted on ThingsSpeak.com. It uses plug & play sensor modules plugged into a Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer prototyping board to measure ambient gas levels and upload them in real-time to ThingsSpeak.com, where they are displayed as graphs.
ThingsSpeak.com is an open-source, Internet of Things platform that allows users to access data for developing cloud-based control systems, or creating apps to process, analyze, and visualize it.
Using these web services, you can see the gas sensor readings on your iPhone, or have the gas sensor send out Tweets to alert you when the gas levels get too high or low.
Devices like this are bridges to a future world where objects of all kinds are embedded with sensors and the ability to communicate. Estimates say that 50 to 500 billion devices will have a mobile cloud connection by 2020. If that’s true, then that future may not be so far away.