IOT: It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States

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And we have much to give thanks for.  Now let’s talk IOT and making some stuff for Thanksgiving to keep the kiddies and adult makers busy.  No pictures…you will need to figure it out without them:

  1. LED Coin Battery light up, this one is easy, if you have any Arduino kit laying about the house and a coin battery, pull out one of the LEDs and touch the one lead of the LED to the coin battery and the other Lead on the LED to other side of the battery if it lights up, then tape and give it to some one old enough to now swallow it to admire.  Put some tape on the LED leads and you have a pretty solid little decoration that didn’t cost much.  Coin batteries can be found in may things, just don’t use the one from your car key fob, after all you will likely want to drive home at some time.  !!! Caution: these parts can be easily swallowed so monitor any use by kids !!!  These LED Coin Battery could be used in simple Origami objects that if you con young children into folding and will be admire by many.  On the other hand if you do the origami perfectly, you might just look bored.  So make sure the kids help out.  Not showing any images because I am too lazy to find my phone (hidden by my wife so I don’t try to escape via Uber).
  2. If you have a LightBlue Bean, Particle Photon WiFi, you can connect to the these devices using a phone (and if you took the coin battery from the Light Blue Bean, now is the time to put it back).  Using the iPhone or Android app you can control you devices.  Kids get a big kick out of this idea and then likely grow bored, so keep it short.  It does give rise some conversational modes that do not include phrases like: “My <medical problem here> has been acting up and I sat in the <Doctor’s office> waiting and met some other people….”  Now you can talk about how the devices work and get ideas from other people about how they could use these devices!  Cool right?  Same idea, the LightBlue bean can easily be put into the Origami pieces. 
  3. I usually go for paper airplane flights in the garage, these are cheap and fun. No IOT right?  Not really, if you have an Ultrasonic Range Finder, you use your Light Blue bean to detect if the paper airplane violates your borders, well, ok, let’s not do that (think about it, what happened in the news this week?  Shoot down of Russian Warplane by Turkey.).  But you could use the Ultrasonic Range Finder to show when the paper airplane flies over a certain area in the garage.  You will need to use the Light Blue Bean for easy connection to your iPhone, Particle Photon for both iPhone and Android.  It is an easy sketch to build if you have a laptop! 

Or my favorite, pull up Gulliver’s Travels on your phone using Kindle, it’s free by the way if you get the original version, and make a game of the names of the cultures that Gulliver traveled to.  After all the current favorite: Lilliput is but one of the nations that Gulliver visited!  This of course has nothing to do with IOT, but it does have a lot to do with this: You don’t like sports, there is a mass of bored kids, and you don’t want to hear another story about anything medical unless it includes the possibility of building something cool, or someone is pregnant (not a medical problem by the way).

Well have a Thankful Thanksgiving and I am thankful for you as a reader.