The world we live in today is connected more than ever, and the reach is going deep through the planet. It looks completely feasible now to have sensors throughout the BC forest to report small scale fires before they turn into national disasters. A possibility that would have been completely impossible a few years ago. We are better than ever at harnessing sun’s energy which makes it possible to have remote and hard to reach locations penetrable by technology.

When we get to actually building such a system there is no consensus on a general framework around how things should be done. The concept of having a few devices perform periodic tasks (such as measurement) and report to a central server keeps getting redeveloped by small and big companies.

As each player tries to lock in as much customers as possible they struggle to keep their service and some of them just shut down [examples: 1,2]. This leaves all the devices already in action useless, adds to our carbon footprint by rendering them garbage and simply is not good.

On the other hand potential users get more skeptical about buying into an innovative company because of the prospects of them having to shut down sometime down the road. No one wants to buy something that might become a total loss due to a company’s financials.

There are a couple of open source solutions and communities being created [HomeAssistant, openHAB] but as much as they are easy to use they do not work out of the box. Also it is more on the command and control side of the equation. This limits the adaptation to enthusiastic users who will be interested in doing some sort of coding and hacking to get things moving.

We think this has to change. There should be an open source framework and guideline that not only can be deployed locally, but also easily deployed by multiple small to big service providers. It should be easy to reprogram a device into a new goal. And more importantly a user must be able to get their data, and migrate to another service provider at any time. This way users won’t be hesitant to join a new service provider in fear of their investment becoming useless. A community of enthusiasts, coders and every day users can all be services under the same umbrella.

We are working on our drag and drop device maker. You can see a demo of it here. Our next step is making the tool that generates the code from one’s sketch. In the meantime, we need your ideas and feedback. What do you want to see changed in the scene?