For one of my last MuleSoft road shows (aka Summits), I put together a demo that was still being discussed even after I left the company. In the demo (which I run through live on stage), I take a picture of an object with my phone and upload it to Instagram. Mule, running on CloudHub, would then grab the picture and calculate its average color. It will then pass that color to an MQTT queue (a popular IoT protocol), which will then be pulled by another Mule running on a local Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is networked to a set of Philips Hue bulbs, and the color of those bulbs would change to the color pulled by the Mule on the Raspberry Pi.
It sounds complicated, but it's quite simple. At a high level, there's a Raspberry Pi set up (always a crowd pleaser), and when I take a picture with my phone, the lights around the room suddenly change color. Add some showmanship, and this demo is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
We decided to update the demo in MuleSoft HQ, this time using Twitter instead of Instagram. In the updated demo, each time someone tweets mentioning @mulesoft, a set of lights (shaped in the MuleSoft logo) brightens. Here's a link to the blog post describing the demo at HQ:
https://blogs.mulesoft.com/dev/anypoint-platform-dev/demo-iot-lights-raspberry-pi/
View the source code on Github.
- Date: February 2015
- Type: Technical Demo