For many people, the Internet of Things is…well, the Next Big Thing. It’s all about using the cloud, real-time data, and new sensor technology to collect, store and analyze information from a wide range of previously-unwired sources: your house, your car, your refrigerator, your pet and so on.
While IoT is certainly very exciting, it’s hard to figure out exactly how to get started building IoT applications…especially if you’re a Web developer without a background in electrical engineering (like me). So I decided to invest a few weekends in learning about IoT and seeing if I could actually get a working IoT application up and running in PHP.
That’s where the Internet of Things Foundation (IoTF) service came in. A hosted cloud service that’s available through IBM Bluemix, IoTF makes it super-easy to aggregate real-time streams for devices and do something useful with them. After a little bit of research, I was able to successfully use it to retrieve GPS coordinates from my Android smartphone and then combine that data with the Google Maps API (and a little bit of PHP glue) to plot my phone’s location on a map in real time.
It’s a simple application, but it goes a long way towards demonstrating the potential of IoT applications…and it’s also given me the foundation I need to begin building more complex applications. If this sounds like something you’d like to get in on as well, take a look at my IBM developerWorks article about using IoT with PHP, and also has some code for you to get started with.