DIY Internet Of Things: The Ultimate Maker Project

With sensors and microcontrollers as cheap as they are, the Internet of things is poised for support from the maker crowd

Last week, word dropped of how the folks at Spark, creators of an Arduino-compatible board for creating homebrew Internet-connected hardware (the Spark Core), had hacked together an open source digital thermostat.

Nobody, Spark included, expects this device to knock Nest, recently acquired by Google, out of the box. But the project hints at how the technology needed to create Internet of things-style devices is well within the reach of most any hardware hacker with only a few dollars to spend.

The maker ethic -- the digital do-it-yourself movement -- has been establishing a name for itself in the last few years with everything from relatively high-profile devices like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino to open source hardware laptops. Sensors, processors, and networking hardware, the three main ingredients for Internet of  things-style devices, are not only now cheap, but can be easily gathered together, programmed, and deployed with commodity hardware and software.