Makers need a fast solution to create and control connected products.

The maker ethic — the digital do-it-yourself movement — has been establishing a name for itself in the last few years with everything from relatively high-profile devices like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino to open source hardware laptops. Sensors, processors, and networking hardware, the three main ingredients for Internet of things-style devices, are not only now cheap, but can be easily gathered together, programmed, and deployed.

The fourth ingredient for a homebrew Internet of things is the cloud. Today we have different startups offering APIs (e.g. Xively, Spark, Bluemix) which make it simple to connect a physical object to the web. This is great, but not enough, because having an API means to create an App to control your devices, and although makers can do everything, they mostly love to play with hardware, not with software.

If you create a connected light you want an App that is designed to control a connected light. That’s what Lelylan is good at.

A simple way to get started

To show you how Lelylan works we started a set of tutorials where we describe step by step how to create a connected light (the simplest device you have at home) using different hardware platforms..

At the end of the tutorial you have a ready to use App working on mobile, tablet and desktop making it possible to control and monitor in realtime your devices, without writing one line of code. We started using the hardware we love the most: Arduino (Yun and Ethernet) and Raspberry Pi. We are also trying out other hardware solutions like Spark Core, Electric Imp, Tinyduino, CC3200 and much more (stay tuned) to give you an open and simple way to connect the physical world, where you can use the hardware you feel most confortable with and where everything communicate.

It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to make everything work. If you like what we are doing, I hope you’ll let me know on Twitter or by sharing this article with anyone you think might find it useful.

Hack your home and have fun ☺