This article from Make is an overview of the nascent Open Source Hardware movement. As I read it I think “Sure, this makes sense for Make, and the Instructables people, because us revealing our work is how THEY make their money. But what about us?” and then I read the developer’s page from Chumby’s site, where they make everything open source, schematics, hardware, much of their source code, etc. How do they do that? And still make money?

I need to figure this out. This is what I want to do. How can I make money while involving the community too?

This post from Make talks about Ambient Inc’s release of their chipset and schematics so other vendors can embed their stuff.

What if I make a gateway and sell it, and I make devices and sell them. Or, I don’t make devices so much as scriptable transceiver boards that work with my gateways and web systems. Then use instructables and make etc to show people how to easily make very cool complex net-connected projects. ??

I’d love to see some Twitter hardware. I know some must be out there, why can’t I find it? I’ve talked before about the idea of a Twitter Sampler. Other options would be twitter on simple displays, and twitter news feeds on your TV. What about the Twitter API?

Twitter is, let’s face it, annoying. So what about making it even more so: a Twitter text to speech machine? One of my talking dolls could spit out my tweets all day and night. Wow, what a headache. But funny!

What about the opposite of the Sampler, where a very large screen aggregates an overwhelming amount of tweets? Like a poster. Could be interesting?

These are all great applications for the aiosphere system:

A Make magazine blog entry shows a nice gizmo that turns on an LED backlight behind a series of little pictures of friends, so the user can see at a glance who’s online. Used VB or similar.

Another Make post, this one about an ambient orb made from an ikea lamp. Notable for use of an Ethernet connection.

Another Arduino ambient orb, this one USB.

Here is video of a news feed scroller which uses a WizNet ethernet chip. Here is a PDF abstract of the project.

Here is a Stock Clock project which uses Zigbee modules, useful for looking at the overall structure of the type of system I am describing.

I don’t know whether a computer can “reach” a gadget on iGoogle.

The basic Gadgets test concept is to make a gadget that gathers (weather or) data and formats it for display on an aio.  Poll this gadget (if possible) from the aio (in the test case represented by my PC).

If it isn’t possible to poll a gadget from another computer, then I could have the gadget periodically write to a text file on my own server.  This text file could be titled 465782ED49009F0B, or whatever the MAC address is of the aio.  The aio could request its own file from the server.  The file would contain only the most recent command, or could be a string of commands.

Next, how would the aio confirm receipt?  I guess by deleting the file, or deleting the contents of the file.

Now, how about if data needs to go the other way?  What if I wanted to make a gadget that passed data between two objects?  Then do files need to have input and output sections?  Or do there need to be two files?

And, is FTP harder than HTTP?