I’d heard of Pachube before, but I discovered it today while looking through Matt Jones’ blog at BERG (his collaboration with the-team-formerly-known-as-Schulze-and-Webb).
Excerpt from their website:
‘Pachube is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables you to store, share & discover realtime sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices & buildings around the world. Pachube is a convenient, secure & scalable platform that helps you connect to & build the ‘internet of things’.’
Excerpt continued – ‘As a generalized realtime data brokerage platform, the key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical “patch bay” (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to “plug-in” to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive environments, networked energy meters, virtual worlds and mobile sensor devices can all “talk” and “respond” to each other.
Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to “blog” sensor data. Through the extensive use of metadata, Pachube adds value to physical interconnectivity: it’s not just about datastreams, but about the environments that make up the datastreams.’
I had been an avid follower of the work of Usman Haque (especially his Sky-Ear project) since I started learning the craft of Interaction Design at Umeå. While I havent had the time to play with Pachube yet, nor get my hands on an arduino board in some time – I am super excited by the thought that efforts such as these, plugged into the open-source community (stuff like Arduino, VVVV, Fritzing and others) are rapidly paving the way for the ‘internet of things’ that every sci-fi writer, designer, thinker dreams of making real.
