Craig Burton offered an intriguing comment on my recent blog post about the Live Web and Interent of Things.  He referred me to two projects that used the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform, Garduino, a computer that runs your garden and Yobot, the Arduino-based Yogurt Maker!

As pointed out by Craig in his comment, we could add WiFi or Ethernet connections to these projects and they would become part of the Internet of Things, connected in a loosely coupled way.

The Arduino platform could be used to prototype all sorts of interesting “Internet of Things” applications.

This reminded me that way back in 2008, I blogged about efforts by my Sun Microsystem colleagues Louis Pfortmiller and Guanghwa Ho to integrate small devices into the Sun Project Destination architecture for highly-personalized online services.  Their efforts involved the use of “SunSPOT” wireless sensor/actuator devices that were programmed in Java.  We discussed all sorts of intriguing uses for this technology It turns out that this project apparently still exists in Oracle Labs:

This almost makes me want to resurrect my old electronics hobby and dive into adding things to the Internet.