Amy Cheng: Building Your Own Internet of Things: How to Connect All of Your Stuff to the Interwebs

There are two prevailing attitudes towards the future of the Internet of Things. It will be awesome or it will be terrible. Either our devices will accommodate us more and more, or instead they’ll reveal all of our secrets to the their corporate overlords. This talk will help the audience inch us all closer to an awesome future by enabling them to build their own Internet-connected devices or at the very least understand enough about existing IoT products to maintain a critical stance. The audience will learn how to use JavaScript, off-the-shelf hardware, and a bit of tape to connect everything they own to the Internet, things like t-shirts and dogs. I will be using an art piece I made, Plant-Bot, as a jumping off point. Plant-bot is a needy house plant that can only talk to people via text message (it doesn't have ears or a mouth), in order to get what it wants (often water). Using Plant-bot as an example, the audience will learn the basics of adding "senses" to their objects, a connection to the Web, and a way for the object to interact with its surroundings.