The Wifiification of Everything

That’s what I want. Everything wifiified.

I want gadgets that can sit on my network when my laptop is away, keeping an eye on things.

For a while I’ve been tinkering (in my mind, always in my mind) with Arduino-hooked-up XBees… these:

(from www.faludi.com)

Which are as cheap as chips (expensive chips) and LadyAda goes on about them in tutorials etc over here.

Trouble is though (if I’ve got this right) they only talk to each other, so setting one up as a network device involves some other bit of kit that I don’t know about – which is probably dead simple, but I still don’t know about it.

Then I saw these…

(from Eye-Fi)

Which are appear to be about $100 – which is way too expensive, but which appear to be smaller… and which maybe behave as a network device… so it’s closer.

Why? Don’t know. But if everything is going to have a computer in it, then it needs to talk to something… and it can’t be my laptop, because it isn’t there 1/2 the time… for example, it would be quite cool to have one of these little cards in every single wall-point / light fitting to micro-manage electricity usage. Seriously – it would be so much easier to manage your myriad stand-bys, chargers, thermostats etc etc off from a single piece of web-enabled software than by going around trying to do it by hand.

In addition to that, if it was a bit of web-enabled software, then there are probably all sorts of crowd-sourcing ramifications etc. I’m sure that simply by knowing where the electricity is going, would go a long way towards stopping it going there.