Last Saturday I attended an event for Amazon Web Services. It was really informative and interesting, but the one that left a lasting impression was the DIY seismograph one of the presenters debuted. It was a dinky little thing, an accelerometer connected to a toothpick needle and handwritten dial. The whole thing relied on an Arduino to send data into AWS, and can send push notifications to a cellphone or turn on an alarm over the Internet.
The kit for portable seismographs will cost into the thousands of dollars. The DIY device showcased at that talk will cost much less, and can be tuned for different functions and greater/lesser sensitivity. It can be distributed to different areas, and AWS provides the analytics tools. The push notification capability alone exponentially increases the speed of info dissemination.
This device is revolutionary because it transfers potential into the hands of the regular people. It has the ability to outperform bloated institutions that are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than actually performing the purpose they were created for. Where I am for example the weather services are a joke. But what if instead of a motion sensor we attach to the Arduino thermometers and hygrometers and anemometers and rain gauges and tide gauges? What if we didn't have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for advisories, and we could depend instead on a message on our phones?
IoT is here, and it is amazing.
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