On this website I want to provide FOSS (Free and Open Source) resources for the Internet of Things (IoT). With these resources I want to propagate means for the maker community to be able to participate in the upcoming IoT rush without the need to develop everything for the network parts (TCP/IP, HTTP, REST, Apps, ...) from scratch. Primary goal is to close the gap between the very active maker community that often has very good skills in hardware plumbing/breadboarding/soldering and Arduino-like embedded programming - but lacks in skill to integrate this basic hardware setup into modern web- and app-based system landscapes. Yes, it was cool to develop a C/Arduino driver for any I2C chip, but today it is much cooler to develop a web app that allows controlling your garage from a tablet or deploy it into the (hopefully soon upcoming) Android sandboxes of your cars ... so let's do it.

I want to thank Eric PTAK, the developer of WebIOPi (see links) for his outstanding pioneer work in this area. I had the maker-like home grown IoT in my mind for years, but too much components missed or did not fit together well. The Arduino-family things were cheap, had a fairly well tooling environment and consumed low energy, but they lacked a stable and modern web/internet support. Same was the matter of case for the Microchip TCP/IP stack - it was available and usable, but it ended up with C hacking on very low level even for the networking stuff which is a no-go in the 21st century (to be honest). And finally, there was the possibility to use some of the low to medium cost Linux machines, but they consumed either too much energy (even 10 Watts is much if you run at 24/7/365) and/or were too expensive to connect some sensors or actors.

Well, and then came the Raspberry Pi around the corner. Looking at the HW/SW specs I immediately knew that this will be an ideal vehicle to realize maker-like IoT stuff. However, the official Raspbian distro did not provide (2 years ago, and still not really does) out of the box the "stack" that I wanted to have: Controlling hardware connected to the Pi via an up-to-date REST web interface that can easily be consumed from Android apps and web browsers. Following the Pi forum threads and googling around I discovered some day WebIOPi at its very early stage. Again, I very soon realized that this can be the seed and base to realize my dream, so it watched it, used it and now finally support and extend it.

The things I provide here are NOT a substitution of WebIOPi. I want to take the things that Eric provides and help him to foster, enrich and support them as much as possible (in my free time). To some extent, I also want to focus more on the generic concepts behind IoT and mainly from a (still coding) user's/consumer's perspective of the API's and not so much on the details how to implement that in details inside the IoT backend components.

Some of the things I provide are closely related to WebIOPi but should not be considered a direct part of it. Some of them can be seen as a kind of generalisation of Eric's concepts and WebIOPi being a concrete example for that. Some of them can be seen as kind of optional pluggable extension to WebIOPi. In order to avoid confusion I have chosen to give all those things a separate web home while keeping close contact with Eric.

This website is created with limited tooling and limited resources, so please don't expect fancy features like blinking widgets, highly interactive blogs or forums. It's main value is the content it provides in the form of documents and downloadable resources. Content is more important that pretty packaging. And - it is advertisement-free.

IMPORTANT HINT: Most downloads on this page are created using Windows machines. Files may contain CR/LF as line delimiters. Sometimes this does not matter; sometimes it does especially when dealing with source code. So if you use source files on UNIX/Linux machines, please download the files to a Windows machine first and then transfer them via Samba Shares or FTP to Linux. In most cases this will automatically correct the line delimiters for text files. This is also true for ZIP files, UNZIP them first on Windows and copy them to Linux afterwards. If I provide tar-files, they will have been created on Linux and can be un-tared as usual on Linux.

I know that IoT hype will span huge discussions and big concerns about data privacy and security and I think this debate will be very important and necessary. But I also don't believe blind all big IT and service providers that all of their (partly free) stuff is kept secure and private under all circumstances (in their clouds). There is no free lunch, you always pay for what you get - nowadays in the modern connected always-on world you pay with something very precious, you pay with data and information about yourself and your daily life. For many folks this is ok, for some others it is not. To me it's obvious that after the Web 2.0 hype and its most prominent flowers aka Google, Facebook (incl. WhatsApp) and Twitter we will see attempts to embrace the upcoming IoT wave for their business model. Take the purchase of Nest Labs by Google as a first step in this direction. I don't want to hinder this, but I am sure that there should be alternatives. Alternatives that foster privacy. While not being the perfect solution to these problems, I think one good solution is to provide Open Source components that allow privacy. Not because they are free - because you can look at the source code and see what's going on. And if you disagree with something, you can tell it to the world and even change it if you want.

The source code that is provided here is ruled by the Apache 2.0 license. For pure documents, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License is used.

Some information here is in German language ("Anbieterkennzeichung", "Ausschluss der Haftung"). This has nothing to do with the technical content but with current German law. Sorry for this ... but I just want to avoid any unnecessary law suits. I hope that German Internet Law 2.0 will make this obsolete some day in the future :-).