Syndicate Your Device’s Content



At SensorLogic I spend a lot of time debating which user interface elements are right for certain tasks. I’m generally of the mindset “don’t reinvent the wheel” and leverage paradigms that already exist. While this doesn’t always apply, I think for 95% of the cases somebody’s already solved the problem and they’ve paid BIG BUCKS to do it. Take Apple and Microsoft for example, they both have interface guidelines for developer’s to adhere to. If you use either one of these operating systems you can either agreee or disagree with their approaches. Just be sure that they didn’t just bang something out and put it on the market.

That’s kind of a long introduction to get to the point I’m trying to make. I’ve been working hard to think outside of the box lately. At SensorLogic we work extremely hard to provide a platform to remotely monitor and control devices. The monitoring part is difficult because I truly believe there’s not a “one size fits all” solution. While I know for a fact that we have one of the best M2M UI’s in the marketplace, I know we can do more with it. The user interface is one of my responsibilities and this is a post to start a new way of thinking.

My thoughts lend more towards a consumer and small business experience while the company focus is mainly on the enterprise right now. With that being said, I think these ideas might be leveraged across the board. The question is “how are devices any different than humans?”. Of course there are a million answers to this question, but to sum my answer up, “they aren’t”. I’m speaking from the perspective of interactions on the web, not daily human behavior. A human can blog, so why can’t a device? I can syndicate content from John Gruber, why can’t I syndicate content from my device? I can IM with friends, why can’t I IM with devices?

So I’m going to start off with the syndication example and will be covering the other ideas in future posts. If you take a look at one of the screens from the SensorLogic platform you can see the telemetry device overview. Think of this telemetry device as the energy meter sitting on the side of your house:

You can see that this device has quite a few sensors that tell you usage, status, etc. Since SensorLogic provides a suite of Web services I decided the next logical step was to provide this data in an RSS feed for consumption. Using a little bit of ColdFusion magic I was able to get this data into RSS format in a matter of minutes (approx 30). You can see the output below. I’ve truncated the data just to keep it concise.

With a minimal amount of work I had an example up and running. I’m going to forget about the authentication piece right now since that will be something that needs to be resolved in the coming weeks. For know let’s just assume everyone has permission to view my energy meter’s data.

The next step was to grab an RSS reader and see if the feed was usable. I use Sage for Firefox, but any RSS 2.0 reader should work. After entering the RSS feed URL and loading it you can see the results below.

So now I have a quick summary of my device information and can set the RSS reader to check for updates on regular intervals. It would be nice to implement some sort of push functionality, but that’s a completely different discussion. Any of the sensor links in the RSS feed can be clicked and for the purposes of this example you’re taken directly to the SensorLogic UI.

You can now see a summary for Average Usage over a given period. This could ultimately link to any interface specific to the application. My ultimate vision is to have a home portal that brings all of my devices and appliances together in a simple interface or multiple interfaces. I haven’t thought this process entirely through yet, but it seems that there’s potential by preventing users from being disrupted from their normal workflow. Users generally don’t want to deal with a new interface and different approach (ie 6 different remote controls in the living room) unless it’s extremely simple. I’ll have more ideas later and please reply if you think I’m on crack again.



One Response to “Syndicate Your Device’s Content”

1. [db75] » Blog Archive » Google Web Clips says:

   March 13, 2006 at 8:49 pm

   [...] It’s interesting to see how different companies are leveraging RSS to provide unique functionality to their users. I posted a while back how machines could possibly publish RSS feeds so that their data and alarms can be monitored. We’re doing something very similar at SensorLogic. [...]