Maybe I’m not imaginative enough, but I don’t see what’s going to become so big with the internet of things. I’m sure it could be useful here and three, and a few gimmicks, but what is the big revolution going to be?
So what I’m asking for is specific examples of what it could be used for. What problems could it solve?
I sure wish it had existed when I was a shipping manager at a factory. It would have made tracking my own inventory, and the location and status of my shipments, far simpler. I also think it might change the way our automobile traffic system works.
I am (in a very small way) involved in making this happen. I design Internet-connected lighting control systems.
Basically, it’s mostly hype.
Having devices be able to talk over the Internet is pretty handy for automation and diagnostics, and that’s the “Big Win.” Having devices be able to talk to each other is mostly useless. The only people who want their refrigerator to communicate with their hot tub are Engineers (like me) - the folks who brought you such smashing successes as Pets.com. There will be some cool devices - like the Nest thermostat and alarm system, but that’s another example of a Internet-connected command and control device, which has no need to talk to your refrigerator, either.
But, I’m sure some clever folks will make a buttload of money off of it (wish it was me).
I imagine it will make crime much tougher than it is now.
beowulff, do you have any experience with interconnected street light control systems? I’ve read about LonWorks and other systems that seem to have a couple of nice features like dimming and predictive monitoring of the lamps. It sounded like a good idea from a operations and maintenance perspective.
Will it make DIY a lot easier?
Mark Cuban (Tech billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team) firmly believes that with the current mobile revolution, we’ll transition to a sensor revolution which is largely what the “internet of things” is dependent on.
Your new smartwatch will be able to feed biometric data to your phone/computer. Your lights/blinds/curtains will be synced to your sleep cycle so you can wake more organically. I heard a news story where DiCaprio had a system set up in his new Manhatten penthouse.
Basically just add a “smart” to whatever you use on a daily basis and imagine how having sensors/internet connectivity would make it better. Smart-car that self-drive, perform self-maintenance, and smart windshields that will never fog up or frost over. Smart-washers and smart-dryers that will wash and dry according to when it’d be cheapest and most efficient based on grid power consumption. Smart toilets that analyze your stool.
I am somewhat familiar with them.
Traditional street lighting uses LPS or HID lamps. These dim as they age, so they waste power during the first part of their lifecycle (they have to be over-sized so they still emit enough light at the end of their useful life). The latest “thing” in HID ballasts is dimming. That allows the lamps to be operated at as low as 50% of their rated power, so as the lamps age, they can be progressively brightened by increasing the dim value. I just designed a dimming control board, because this is an issue for sports lighting, too.
Most “smart” streetlight systems are going to ZigBee, or some other mesh-network. This allows diagnostics (lamp or ballast failure), control, and data collection.
Of course, LEDs are the future of street lighting, but the principles are the same.
I don’t work in that area - the players are all huge.
The system I designed has been remote-controlled for 14 years, and Internet (cellular) connected for 7. The change-over from 2G to 3/4G cellular is really hurting us - AT&T is phasing out 2G, and we have many hundreds of systems that use it.
How about this example…
Your garage door opener.
You know what a pain it is to code in a new door opener ? Get up on ladder and press these buttons, beep push , buzz, bang, the door closing knocks over the ladder . back from the hospital, oh great, nothing works, try again
Well what if it was “interneted” ?
But then everything can have a firmware… eg there were fridges with “Bad” firmware, in that the temperature would go TOO WARM, because they were programmed to cheat the economy efficiency (kWh used per year) test !!! So they could do with a firmware upgrade system…
Imagine calling up service desk to ask about the operation of your washing machine, dishwasher, AND Digital TV ? They click click click, download the history, and say
“yep, your UHF antenna is broke, the dishwasher is warn out, and the washing machine has a clogged filter”…
Than any 13 year old kid would be able to open your garage door…
There will be applications for “Things” that aren’t readably obvious. Here is a site which explains the protocols that are being used today. Word around the camp fire is that there is a lot of playing going on right about now to study these protocols and then do what-ifs. Device to Device (D2D) communication doesn’t necessarily include you (think Nest thermostat). When applied, most of this will be under the covers. You won’t even be aware of it but it will change your world, soon.
Legend has it that in the early days of the internet (mid 1970’s or so?), when only geeks at certain universities and research places (like Bell Labs) had access to it, that
a group of people (grad students at CMU?) had a lab in an upper floor of a building, and there was a vending machine on the ground floor. They built an interface in the vending machine that detected whether it had various items or was empty, and put that on the internet. Thus, they could tell when it was sold out without having to go downstairs and look.
Sorry, no cite, and I don’t remember where I heard this. But I do remember that I heard this story a long long time ago, which proves at the very least that the idea has been kicking around for a long time.
ETA: Well, I’ll be hornswoggled. With less than one minute of google searching, I found this telling of the story.
What is the Internet itself if not a collection of things “useful here and there”? We still live the same basic lives as people before computers: Wake up, go to to work, eat, fuck, die, but in between we can now access a lot more information. Whoop-de-doo. Adding more smart objects will further trivialize the mundane elements of our lives so we can watch more cat videos.
One example: My university is evaluating a smart parking lot in which every stall has a little sensor that can tell whether a car is parked there. That information gets uploaded in real time to the Internet, so students can tell which parking stalls/lots have open spaces without having to circle the whole campus over and over. In practice, I’m worried this means they’ll all be looking at phones and squishing pedestrians as everyone blindly races towards the same open space, but hey, that’s the cost of progress. Apparently some cities already use this system and it seems to work well, but I don’t know its impacts on vehicular accidents.
Another oft-cited example is the smart electricity grid. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a prerequisite to a cleaner energy future (because it attempts to normalize hourly loads so you don’t have sudden peaks and drops in consumption, which is hard for wind/solar/tides to keep up with), or it’s an evil conspiracy to give everyone cancer and spy on them using invisible electric waves (this is seriously something we have to deal with, and our local utility had to mount a huge PR campaign to try to assuage people’s fears)… sigh.
Another possible shift (or bubble) is personal biometrics, devices that continually monitor your vitals to let you know you’re still a fat, lazy bastard who doesn’t drink enough water. My phone can tell me exactly how much I weigh, how much CO2 is in my air, how fast my heart is beating, how much fat/carbs/calories is in that X kg of Y that I just ate, and I can look at all that on pretty graphs and promptly proceed to ignore it.
I think that stuff would get really cool once they’re sensitive enough to read not just physical but psychological/emotional states as well. Right now, while I’m driving I use my watch to control my phone to play internet songs on my car radio, all so I don’t have to take my hands off the wheel or squint at the tiny, crappy phone or radio screen. Ten years from now: If brain/pheromone/pulse/skin resistance sensors can sense every passenger’s mood and excitement level, correlate it with the current and max vehicle speeds, the outside air temperature, currently trending music, road surface composition, etc., the car could automatically choose to roll down all the windows, adjust the shocks to make for a quieter ride, turn up the volume, and play the latest annoying pop song. Or if everyone’s calm and tired, electrodim the windows, inject some sleeping aids into their bloodstreams, and put on some Muzak. At first everyone will think it’s gimmicky and pooh-pooh the tech, but fifty years from now it’ll be standard on all personal space flights while someone wonders “What’s the big deal with this interweb of nanoplanets thing, anyway? So my mom can check on her garden moon from home – oh look, kale #24592 has a new leaf! – but the robots are taking better care of it than she every could anyway, so why bother?”
I think the biggest revolution in tech is that tech has become trivial to us. When you go from steam engines to omniscience in 50 years, the only plausible adaptation for your species is an overwhelming numbness.
All very good points. So I guess I should just consider this as a gradual evolution of the smartphone/internet revolution
Hmm, for a while it was all about B2B (Business to Business) but that didn’t quite reach critical mass. So now we’re jumping to D2D…what, no C2C? 
Doesn’t have anything to do with smartphones directly- they’re one more facet of the increasing use of the internet.
The whole “internet of things” is dependent on being able to uniquely identify “things”, which means that each item will have to be able to have its own address.
Once that’s done, they can communicate amongst themselves, and there are a lot of interesting possibilities.
For example, the coke machine mentioned upthread might actually communicate with the company contracted to keep it full, and notify them of the usage patterns, so that the fill-up guy’s route can be optimized.
Or… an appliance might have some self-diagnostic capabilities built in, and in case of failure, could notify the repair place of the fault, and what kind of fault it is, so they can come prepared with the right parts and knowledge to repair the appliance.
Your house could possibly be networked in such a way that your thermostat, lights, blinds/shades and ceiling fans are all controlled in such a way that you’re kept well-lit and comfortable with a minimum of energy consumption.
I’m personally not convinced that the majority of household items have compelling reasons to be networked; what’s the reason for networking my toaster? I still want hot toast in the morning, regardless of when the most efficient time to make toast is, and it’s not like the toaster is really going to better toast my bread based on some kind of internet bread database and a bread type sensor. I mean, it would be more hands-off and more accurate in an academic sense, but it doesn’t take long to figure out where to set your toaster for 99% of breads you’ll encounter, and most people wouldn’t pay fifty cents more for networking it vs. just adjusting the toaster by hand.
I think what we’ll see first is networked lights, air vents and the like, coupled with sensors. That way, they can selectively heat and cool the house at the right times and places to keep the residents comfortable and not spend energy heating or cooling rooms that people aren’t in, or at times when nobody’s typically home.
And when you have a random hook up you could bump phones and that’d give STI history of partners.
That all makes sense for an internal system - where I have a slight(?) concern is the internet-ing of it all. OK, maybe it’s useful for system monitoring by the provider, and remote control by the homeowner. But - (wait for it) all of this data is being captured and stored about when I’m home and even what room I’m in? OK - paging Edward Snowden!
Consumer to Consumer (or possibly Client to Client). Amazon already did it with their reviews. 
So all those people with the tinfoil hats saying that their kitchen appliances are conspiring against them will end up right?