Catlu – Arialy – Object

IoT – Umbrella

Physical Object Documentation:

If This Then That Documentation:

Diagram:

For our project, we were drawn to the idea of using the internet and the Little Bits to establish a connection between 2 people. We thought a lot about how we could use the little bits we had (mostly lights, buttons, and a speaker), to establish a relationship between different places. In the end we decided to use the sound of rain. When people are living apart from each other in different places, it’s often hard to feel connected because you do not experience things together anymore. The final idea we decided on was a set of 2 umbrellas, each of which uses a cloud bit to connect to If This Then That. Each umbrella would be set to the place where the opposite person is, so when the opposite person is experiencing rain, you will hear the rain too. Sometimes it only take a little to help establish a greater feeling of intimacy, and our project was an attempt to do so. For the umbrella, we connected a wall charger power bit to a cloud bit and an input speaker bit and an mp3 player. We then connected the cloud bit to IFTT and created an applet with Weather.com that would let you set a location. If the status of the location changes to “rain,” IFTT sends a signal to the cloud bit, and the speaker will start playing the music from the mp3 player. Optimally we would have wanted something small like an Ipod Nano or Shuffle, but had to make do with a phone. Originally we also wanted to use a battery for the power supply, but the p1 battery power didn’t work with the cloud bit, which then wouldn’t connect to IFTT. We ended up using the wall charger bit and running the strip along the edge of the wall.