#airqualityegg: People participating in the conversation about air quality

Last month I blogged about a community project called AirQualityEgg aimed at giving citizens a way to participate in the conversation about air quality.  You can read about it here.  You can also join the google group, read/contribute to the wiki, or add your email to this list if you want to know where to go to buy one when we start taking orders.

Credit: Albert Chao

One thing that's been strongly validated in the month since has been an intense interest from communities and individuals all over the world in their local air quality.  People from five continents have reached out to offer their support in various ways, over 150 people have indicated they are interested in purchasing an Egg, and 70 people have showed up to workshops in two different cities .  There are 50 people participating in the google group discussions.  This has obviously struck a nerve.  People want to know.

New features: Frozen feed triggers edition

Some new features recently went live!  Unfortunately, a lot of these normally slip under the radar, but as a resolution for the New Year, we're going to be better at talking these up.  After all, our awesome development team is busy making magic... and people gotta know.

People talking about Things that tweet

We talk a lot at Pachube about empowering communities.  The best communities develop important conversations, demand action, curate leadership, and ultimately produce some kind of output that matters.  We've been thinking hard about how our global data platform intersects with global communities and how we can help facilitate this new kind of collaboration around real-time data. This has recently manifested itself in two very simple ways:

Opening University energy data so people can understand their own impact

Pachube Pioneer: Derek Foster
Resides: Sheffield, UK
Occupation: PhD Researcher
Web: http://www.derekfoster.net/
Pachube Feeds: http://pachu.be/24356
Data: Electricity

At the University of Lincoln 60 miles outside of London, there are a range of buildings that vary in age from hundreds of years old to brand new. Derek Foster, a researcher at Lincoln, is working on a project to show that just because some of these buildings weren't designed for electrical systems doesn’t necessarily mean that they must be less efficient than their newer counterparts. Why? It turns out the energy usage habits of the people inside the buildings make a huge difference! He posits: “With the understanding that automated systems can only go so far in reducing consumption, we must adopt the view that people are not just noise when looking at a buildings energy usage, they have a huge impact.”

Sending triggers with Twitter

One of the pieces of functionality we've been working away on is a way to make it easy for users to automatically send tweets when triggers are fired. Because this is based on a plugin system, it makes it much easier to build more plugins, so this is the first of hopefully many different options for being able to send triggers via different methods. Let us know if you have any special requests.
If you're an avid Twitter user then you might also find it interesting to create a feed to automatically track your Twitter stats via Pachube. With this plugin you could even automatically tweet when they change! Check out the app here. Check out the screencast for a demo below the break:

You can help build an open air quality sensor network

Where's the data? Look outside your window -- have you ever wondered what the quality of the air is out there? I mean RIGHT. OUT. THERE. 12 inches from your face. If so, you are out of luck. The air quality data collected by the government is likely sampled from far, far away and then applied to you on a regional level, almost completely useless from the standpoint of trying to understand or change the local dynamics of pollution that affect you. Not good. If you're interested in joining a community of people who are going to change that, read on.

OnBoard: enabling a world of open data devices

Last month, we made Pachube free for all our users, removing a significant barrier to entry for people and devices to get onto our platform. As another step in that direction, we are today releasing OnBoard, our first turn-key solution aimed directly at device makers of all sizes. With OnBoard, we're making it quick, cheap and easy to offer connected services with internet-enabled hardware.

OnBoard includes:

1. Device bulk-registration: Manufacturers can provision devices onto Pachube and specify

data profiles.

2. End-user account integration: Device owners can now claim their devices and their data directly on Pachube.

3. Dashboards: Once devices are claimed, device owners view dashboards hosted within their accounts.

Pachube's OnBoard service is a pathway onto the open, people-centric Internet of Things for devices and data – that have in the past have been tied to specific services and software. By breaking open the traditional data-silo/walled-garden approach to building connected services, data can be re-used across many different applications. This increases the value of the data to both its owner and the device manufacturer, while also creating a way for third-parties to develop compatible products on a common framework.

The Pachube Debug Page

Here's a quick demo of a new feature we're pretty pleased with. The new debug page shows you how many requests you've made to the API in the last 10 minutes as well as a stream of live API requests as you make them.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on behind the scenes involving message queues, Node.js and websockets but hopefully the end result is easy to use and useful for debugging.

Let us know how it works for you and if there's anything else you'd like to see.  Video below the break.

Bringing down the barriers: Pachube service goes free!

We’re making the Pachube service free for all users.

As of today there will only be one type of account. Every user will have unlimited datastreams, datapoint uploads and history as well as the option to create private feeds. We are setting a limit on the API request rate at 100 requests/minute. Current PRO users will see their rate limit go up from 40/minute to 100/minute. Current PREMIUM users will keep their current rate limit of 250 requests/minute. Any user can request an increased rate limit by contacting support@pachube.com.

We will be upgrading everyone’s account in the next few hours. Anyone who has paid for a yearly subscription in the last 60 days will get an automatic refund via PayPal. We made this decision simply because that’s how far back PayPal allows us to go. If you disagree with this decision, please contact us. We’re making this change to make Pachube more accessible to new and existing users, and we want to make sure no one feels treated unfairly.

The value of open hardware is in the empowerment of communities

There's something big happening right now at the intersection of open hardware and the Maker movement -- critical mass is being reached.  Chris Anderson famously termed it the next Industrial Revolution, but back in early 2010 detractors could still downplay its significance. In the mean time, the barriers to entry for building new products have been dropping at a frantic pace, opening up the market and recasting less technical newcomers as Makers. Designers, architects, artists, and activists can now build nearly anything they can dream up on top of the open platforms that are cropping up like weeds.  Not only that, they can also build them at low volumes, cheaply and quickly, tapping into the "billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people." (Cory Doctorow)

Internet of Things NYC Meetup and how to pitch your Sensor Project

NEW YORK! The frenzy that is the startup tech community in New York City is about to get some fresh juice!  Now that the city is giving Silicon Valley a run for its money (if not in $ raised, then definitely in level of awesomeness of companies funded), it's time to harness some of that POWER for the tidal wave that we call the Internet of Things.  New York has got the design chops, hardware savvy, and raw thirst to make this happen, and we want to help move it along and be a part of it however we can.

No more secrets: Open data pioneer unlocks government radiation datasets

Pachube Pioneer: Marian Steinbach
Resides: Cologne, Germany
Occupation: User Experience Designer
Web: http://www.sendung.de/
Pachube Feeds: http://pachube.com/users/marian
Data: Gamma radiation

The death knell has rung for the Dark Ages of Data where we all had to beg to get a glimpse into BigGov's secret vaults of knowledge.  People have the right to access data gathered from public space, and they are now exercising that right.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, people from all over the world came together to aid support efforts in the form of a crowdsourcing movement around real-time radiation data.  While citizens in Japan continue even now to contribute public data streams to Pachube to fill in significant gaps in the official reports, others, like Marian Steinbach, have worked hard to put pressure on governments to make available the data they do have. Moreover, Marian has also done the important work of making these official feeds actually useful:

Pachube just got some rocket fuel!

We've spent the last three years building out what we believe is the most fully featured Internet of Things web service that you'll find. We've brought together an incredible team, architected an open, scalable and secure infrastructure, and been lucky enough to be joined by all of you: the most innovative and creative Internet of Things enthusiasts in the world.

But we're not stopping there.

We want to scale up further, connect more sensors and devices, track more environments and help more people build tools for understanding real-time data from their cities. We envisage an ecosystem of trust – between users, application developers and device companies – in which collaboration supports creative initiatives for sensing and responding to conditions in the physical world.

YOU are the "Smart City"

Do you buy this "Smart City ®" that is being peddled to you? Do you feel the magnificent effects of BigGov and BigCo overhauling urban infrastructure with "Smart City ®" connected traffic lights, energy meters, and surveillance systems? Does knowing where the "Smart City ®" subway is in real-time BLOW YOUR FREAKING MIND??

Here's a newsflash: (Dramatic pause.......) Using computers and the internet increases efficiency! Of basically everything! Even cities!

Blistering cynicism aside, let's face it, BigGov missed the boat big-time on this one. Shouldn't they have delivered on the "Smart City ®" a long time ago? I mean, it's 2011. People are building their own flying drones out of cell phones and Arduinos. People are consolidating all the world's information onto Wikipedia. People are using Twitter to stage national revolts.

And BigGov is busy connecting garbage cans.

Crowdsourcing data accuracy

There are now about 2500 radiation feeds on the Pachube platform!  This is an unprecedented, massive amount of data, packed with potential, but also pretty frequently criticized.  The sources are unknown and the calibration and quality of the sensors are unknown, so this movement at times has been labeled as simply an untrustworthy source with the potential to cause mass-panic. A comment on one of our previous blog posts asked, "Most of these sources have a disclaimer that 'we are not responsible for data quality.' So be it. But if you can't count on anything, what use is it?"

Tracking planes: Noisy nuisance over Brooklyn can't quiet Jeff Starin

Pachube Pioneer: Jeff Starin
Resides: Brooklyn, NYC
Occupation: Real Estate
Web: http://www.prospectparkquietskies.org
Pachube Feed #25863: http://pachu.be/25863
Data: Ambient noise

Jeff Starin doesn't like jumbo jets flying over his house at low altitude all day long.  Not only is the noise an obvious irritation and stress inducer, but prolonged exposure can actually affect one's health. You might be tempted to call it a simple byproduct of urban living, but in fact an "airspace redesign" initiated by the FAA in 2007 has turned flights on their approach to LaGuardia Airport in NYC from what Starin calls a "fan pattern" into a one long corridor right over his neighborhood, Prospect Park.

Pachube is IPv6-ready! Smart-city demo with Cisco, AT&T, and Worldsensing

Today is "World IPv6 Day", an industry-wide test-drive of the IPv6 infrastructure.  As part of this event, Pachube has worked closely with AT&T to implement a redundant pair of IPv6 tunnels into our network. The pachube.com website and the Pachube API at api.pachube.com will be from this point forward fully IPv6 compliant.  Users and applications can now pull data directly from devices with IPv6 addresses and fire HTTP triggers at IPv6 URLs with no changes to their applications.

The Internet of Sewage and Leif Percifield's "dontflush.me" revolution

Pachube Pioneer: Leif Percifield
Resides: Brooklyn, NYC
Occupation: Parsons Grad Student
Web: http://dontflush.me
Pachube Feed #24004: http://pachu.be/24004
Data: Water level of overflow sewer

Some 27 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped in NY Harbor every year.  This harmful waste comes from Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) that open when the sewer system fills up with runoff during wet weather.  However, by measuring the water level at a CSO, it's possible to know when an overflow event is likely to occur.  If residents of the city were notified that such event was imminent, they could make conscious decisions to use less water and take a little pressure off of the system.  At the least, they can make sure what's in their own toilet bowl doesn't end up in the Harbor!  Multiplied a million times over, a serious issue plaguing urban environments could be avoided.

How Google PowerMeter got it wrong and how to fill the gap

[Update: PowerMeter is dead as a doornail! You gotta be out by September 16 of this year. 90 day eviction!] A few days ago Google deprecated a bunch of their API's, including Google PowerMeter.  The reaction from the community has been a bit raw, with notables like Limor Fried of Adafruit saying she had predicted almost a year ago that PowerMeter wasn't "a serious effort at Google" and that "Google didn't really do much in this space".  This isn't so surprising to us though, as they've never been able to deliver on a few key drivers:

• Direct consumer access to real-time data
• Secure access to data by third-party service providers / application developers

Crowdsourced Gardening? John Gordon's Bhut Jolokia Peppers

Pachube Pioneer: John Gorden
Resides: Calgary, Canada
Occupation: I.T. Manager for hospital patient care systems
Web: http://about.me/john.gordon
Pachube Feed #3194 : http://pachu.be/3194
Data: Temperature, light, soil moisture of growing environment

Bhut Jolokia, the hottest pepper plant known to man at over 1 million Scoville units, is also one of the hardest to grow.  However, in John Gordon's basement, the Bhuts have a carefully tuned environment controlled by automated heaters, watering pumps, fans, and lights.  The system is all controlled by an Arduino and the data is sent to Pachube for monitoring (John likes to make sure the Bhuts are safe and sound when he's at work).