Both [Dylan Pierce] and [Dani Eichorn] have mirror projects that display the weather. They took two different approaches which makes for an interesting comparison. [Dylan] uses a Rapsberry Pi with an actual monitor behind the mirror. [Dani] puts an OLED behind the mirror driven by a ESP8266. It appears there is more than one way to hack a mirror, or anything, which is what makes hacking fun.
https://kaalpanik.in/IoT/#home

Many analysts have suspected Intel’s ability to develop effective devices’ Internet of things, but by now the processor giant has shown everyone else to be serious. The company introduced three new Quark processors and two different operating systems on IoT applications.

Intel’s processors are published by Quark SE system chip and D1000 and D2000 “microcontroll
IoT circuits need to be supported by the operating system and Intel’s Wind River Unit yesterday saw the launch of no less than two new operating system: Rocket Real time operation system (RTOS) for 32-bit microcontrollers and Pulsar Wind River Linux version that also supports 64-bit processors.
https://kaalpanik.in/IoT/#home

The researchers from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) have created a self-sufficient energy producing system in the form of a pair of socks with 24 miniaturised microbial fuel cells (MFCs). The cells are powered by fresh human urine pumped by the user’s footsteps, so you might still need to waggle your feet around once in a while.

In the experiment described in a paper published in the Bioinspiration and Biomimetics journal, the researchers managed to power a wireless transmitter with the energy produced by the socks, which sent a signal to a PC every two minutes.

“This work opens up possibilities of using waste for powering portable and wearable electronics,” said Professor Ioannis Ieropoulos who led the experiment. “For example, recent research shows it should be possible to develop a system based on wearable MFC technology to transmit a person’s coordinates in an emergency situation. At the same time this would indicate proof of life since the device will only work if the operator’s urine fuels the MFCs.”

lots of products that came to market in the recent past and that will come to market in the near future that use some kind of cloud hosted component. In many cases these products rightly use some kind of off-device service in order to provide you with features that would otherwise not be possible. Sometimes these features are so much part of the core product that the whole idea would be dead in the water without it.

But there are also many products for which it makes very little or even no sense at all to have a cloud based component. In many of these cases if you look a bit more closely at what is being sold you’ll realize that these are just instances of a business-model that was grafted on as an afterthought onto something that would have worked really well stand-alone but where the creators weren’t happy with a one-time fee from potential buyers.

The last couple of years have seen ever more blatant abuses of this kind of trick to the point where even the most close study of the applications has not been able to reveal a reason why the ‘cloud’ should even be a factor in the design of the product. Some examples: internet-of-things applications that come with a mandatory subscription to get your own data back, televisions that require you to sign up with an online service in order to be able to use the TV’s built in browser, navigation devices or apps that contain all the bits and pieces required to work except that they somehow also require you to sign up with a service before the device will function. The list is absolutely endless.

I hate these clouds-grafted-on devices and applications with a passion. There are only a few things more certain than death and taxes and one of those is that the device I own will outlive the required service component so sooner or later (and plenty of times sooner)

Software as a service to many people is the way to convert what used to be licensed software into a repeat revenue stream and in principle there is nothing wrong with that if done properly (Adobe almost gets it right). But if the internet connection is down and your software no longer works, if the data you painstakingly built up over years goes missing because a service dies or because your account gets terminated for no apparent reason and without any recourse you might come to the same conclusion that I came to: if it requires an online service and is not actually an online product I can do just fine without it.

“What’s the weather like, honey?” “I don’t know. Let me check the mirror.” The mirror?

Both [Dylan Pierce] and [Dani Eichorn] have mirror projects that display the weather. They took two different approaches which makes for an interesting comparison. [Dylan] uses a Rapsberry Pi with an actual monitor behind the mirror. [Dani] puts an OLED behind the mirror driven by a ESP8266. It appears there is more than one way to hack a mirror, or anything, which is what makes hacking fun.

ESP8266 WeatherStation with a Magic Mirror
http://blog.squix.ch/2015/12/esp8266-weatherstation-with-magic-mirror.html

A Raspberry Pi powered Magic Mirror
http://blog.dylanjpierce.com/raspberrypi/magicmirror/tutorial/2015/12/27/build-a-magic-mirror.html