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.

I accidentally deleted one of Nitin’s comments before it got approved, this was a response to one of my posts about hardware, musing about USB, Ethernet, and how much autonomy a device should have:

“Did you get a chance to look at my imgizmos site?
I basically went USB and offloaded all intelligence to the PC.
In fact the USB device only operates a relay based on the PCs commands.
The PC gets its command from yahoo IM.
What I am getting at is that a device connected to a PC needs to have very little intelligence since the PC is way more powerful.
You probably only need smarts in the device if it is not always connected (in which case it cant bring in twitter/I messages anyways).”

Thanks for the comment, Nitin.  I used the power of the PC for the past couple of years (via USB), but have since decided that independence from it is a very good idea.  More and more people are moving to laptops as their primary PC, which are on standby when not in use.  And there is a trend toward no PC at all in several people I know!  iPhone, Blackberry, these are enough for them.  So not even any home internet connection.

The Ethernet idea is based on the assumptions that many people have high-speed internet connections at home, and that modern routers have more than one Ethernet jack.  So a little custom gateway, using the one-way method I discuss elsewhere, is the simplest thing I can think of.

But I have also looked at a Bluetooth-cellular-internet path through smart phones.  This wouldn’t be bad, if more people had data plans, and writing gateway apps for phone OS’s didn’t have so many wireless-vendor-imposed security barriers, and Bluetooth had better range, and making BT connections wasn’t such a headache!