This Month In Things: March 2017
Happy St. Patrick's Day! ☘️ Every month, we provide a quick-and-dirty overview of interesting things that happened over the last month in IoT and connected devices.
If videos aren’t your thing, we have the text version below.
Raspberry Pi Zero W
Raspberry Pi released a new piece of hardware called the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Using the same chip that’s in the Pi 3, this new hardware has support for WiFi and Bluetooth, and costs only $10. However, you won’t be able to buy one anytime soon because they are sold out everywhere.
UPS Drone Truck Launch
Instead of making drones fly from warehouses, UPS decided that it would be a better idea to launch the delivery drones from their trucks to recipient’s homes. They tested this concept, in Tampa Florida this month. But, this won’t be in production any time soon. Currently, UPS is working with the FAA to make this happen.
Alexa and the First Amendment
A big question was raised this month: Is Alexa protected by the First Amendment? Amazon is arguing that not only are the user’s requests protected but Alexa’s responses are too. Since this article was published, Amazon has abandoned this fight. The defendant was willing to give this information to the police.
Disney Creates Wireless Charging Room
Today, wireless charging works by placing your device on a charging pad. Disney is changing this by creating a wireless charging room. You will be able to walk into this room, and your devices will just begin to charge.
However, there is one caveat, due to safety rules, no human can stand within 46 centimeters from the copper rod that’s needed in the center of the room because that kind of radio exposure is dangerous to the human body. On the other hand, being in other parts of the room are completely safe.
Connected Teddy Bear Hack
Spiral Toys made an internet-connected bear that allows parents to send heartfelt messages to their kids through a speaker in the bear. This was fun until the bear was hacked. While not only exposing 800,000 emails and passwords, the company knew about it two months before it was public and didn’t do anything. To make matters worse, if you were close enough to the bear, you could hijack the bear and have it say creepy messages.
Turn Touch Remote
Every month, we try to feature an awesome, crowd-funded, connected project.
This month, the featured project by Samuel Clay is called Turn Touch. It’s a beautiful, wood-grain, Bluetooth smart-home remote. It fits right in the palm of your hand and only has four programmable buttons.
The best part about this project is that the entire thing is open-sourced, which means you can see the whole process behind the making of the remote — to hopefully make a device like this yourself.
That’s all for this month! Until next time, Stay Connected 😉
This Month in Things is brought to you by Losant. Losant is an easy-to-use and powerful developer platform designed to help you quickly and securely build complex connected solutions.
