Almost 15 years ago I worked on an Internet of Things project. Yes, I know, the IoT concept wasn't used by then, but the technology was there.
The device I used was the TINI (Tiny INternet Interface), a product of Dallas Semiconductor, which company later was acquired by Maxim.
The "board" was a 68-pin SIMM that is approximately 103 mm wide, 32 mm tall running Java. There was a small unix like operating system and even a web server. Believe me or not, I still have a door lock with access control running on a TINI. Here is a picture of the board:
A very popular project using this board was the internet weather station. The weather sensors also were from Dallas, and based on the popular 1-Wire protocol. The circuit was extremely simple:
Just a couple of sensor chips on the 1-Wire bus. The DS2401 puts his unique serial number on the bus when the associated reed switch is closed. The reed switches are triggered by a magnet connected to a weathervane. The DS1820 outputs the measured temperature, the DS2423 counts the triggers caused by the reed switch connected to a wind speed sensor. The DS2407 is a switch which activates the wind direction measure.
I still have this 1-Wire weather station laying around and would like to give it a new life.
Although I also have a TINI interface laying around, I decided to use state of the art technology in the form of a SPARK Core board.
The SPARK Core is a tiny Wi-Fi development board that makes it easy to create internet-connected hardware. The Core is all you need to get started; power it over USB and in minutes you'll be controlling LEDs, switches and motors and collecting data from sensors over the internet! (https://www.spark.io/dev-kits).
In the following blog posts I will describe my experience with the SPARK Core when putting my old 1-Wire weather station to life.
Stay tuned.