Bought one of these from ThinkGeek, and it would make a great Arduino project.

Can it be easily retrofitted to create an ambient indicator?  What a nice data visualization object it would make!

How about building the aiosphere gateway into it, and using it to render and animate connections and data traffic traffic between nodes and the gateway and the gateway and the server?

I love keeping an eye on Instructables for USB ambient indicator apps.

Currently there’s an instructable by the USB Typewriter person, showing how to make your own USB typewriter.

And though they didn’t use USB, the idea is the same: one cool, super-simple indicator that uses a parallel port, of all things, two LEDs, and a little piece of server software, and a browser script, to indicate new Facebook posts.

I’ve been focusing more on gainful employment for the past six months than the aiosphere project, so IPSO is probably very old news for others, but it’s very encouraging to see this momentum building, if ever so slowly!  It’s been seventeen years since the internet coffee pot!  I know that’s not technically a smart connected object itself, but it is the earliest evocation I can remember of the idea of the need to connect things, or their status, across the network.

In this IPSO white paper Dunkels summarizes his familiar argument for IP as the common language of connected things.  Although the idea seems to me somewhat simpler when focusing on wireless nodes,  and not worrying about the practical implementation issues at the internet gateway.

Here’s n IPSO paper on IPv6 for smart objects, and one on merging 802.15.4 and IP.