Steve Reubenstone gets up every day and walks to work in Soho at a hyper-cool WeWork shared space on Varick Street in NYC. The space that acts as the home of Collaborizm resembles a large trading floor with rows and rows of people staring into monitors and inventing the future.
Dozens of IoT inventions are being launched and built every week on Collaborizm, a rapidly growing, global online community of engineers, developers and creatives who help each other make and connect things. And they do it for free, on what may be one of the world’s most interesting open source platforms for human creativity.
“We have over 35,000 registered members,” Reubenstone said in a recent interview, “and because we started out with a hardware engineering focus, there are a lot of physical things being created – from special purpose robots and drones, to alternative energy harvesting machines, to headsets with EEG sensors that can help humans improve their mood.”
Reubenstone, who started Collaborizm out of his own frustration in college (he studied engineering at the University of Miami) trying to find other engineers that he could tap for advice and help. “I had all these ideas but I needed other people to help me bring them to life, including not only hardware engineers and designers, but also other unique skills like artists and physicists.”
Over the last year in particular, Reubenstone has seen connected machines trending fast; Collaborizm makes it easy for people to join and start creating together, and Collaborizm’s extensive analytics enables Reubenstone and his co-founders to understand where the energy in the community is going in real-time.
“What’s been really interesting is seeing how IoT and the web is evolving, with more and more open source IoT middleware, more and increasingly affordable high quality microcontrollers and sensors, and an ocean of rest APIs and mobile SDKs which are giving inventors and developers more tools to work with,” Reubenstone said. “But the biggest single impact we’re seeing is JavaScript (JS) as a means to develop hardware.”
One of the tools Collaborizm members are starting to work with is the Johnny-Five Inventors Kit (J5IK), the first kit available for developing projects using the Tessel 2 and the Johnny-Five Robotics and IoT Platform. The kit includes an IoT project building platform, everything needed to complete up to 14 circuits, resistors, a USB microB cable, miniature photocell, mini-power switch and more. motor drivers, resistors, LEDs, soil-moisture sensor, and loads more.
“With the increasing access to boards like Raspberry Pi, Node.js is spreading through our global community. It’s one thing to dream up an idea, and another thing to actually build and connect products, and we’re very excited about the work our self-forming teams are doing together creating seamless and secure connections between hardware, programming and networking,” Reubenstone said.
In addition to Raspberry.pi, boards that work with Node.js include Intel Edison and BeagleBone Black. Smaller units like ARM-chip-based small microcontrollers is another story. “Node.js also works with Npm modules using IoT communication protocols including HTTP, MQTT, AMPQ. Cylon.js supports IoT development as well, which is helping to accelerate a lot of our projects,” Reubenstone said.
Using Node.js for IoT applications is not without its challenges, including a large memory footprint for smaller IoT devices. But part of what Collaborizm is all about is crowd sourcing to solve for challenges like this.
“Before javascript-based hardware platforms, the engineering community has been heavily divided between hardware and software engineers. Each lives in its own isolated environments, have different friends, lingos, and communities. I think engineers like myself (me being a hardware engineer) -- feel very distanced from software engineers. We deal with a different set of physics and principles. However, I know in my gut how similar we are, as tinkerers, but have struggled to find ways to bring us together on a more meaningful level,” said Reubenstone.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
