Using Home Assistant with Manifold
Manifold is evolving into a proper framework for building meshes of picos, and Home Assistant gives those meshes an interface. A new Home Assistant integration proves out three pieces at once: an OAuth workflow on the pico-engine that lets outside software into the mesh on the owner's terms, a mature interface rather than a custom one, and a pattern that lets specialized communities extend the platform.
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Manifold API and Sensor Network: Two New Repos
Cleaning up manifold-api as a prerequisite for the spring conversational interface Capstone turned into a complete platform update: Pico Engine 1.0 compatibility, automated bootstrap, centralized notifications, and a Docker-based integration test harness. Once the platform was solid, the old temperature-network had an obvious new home inside Manifold's community framework, so I rewrote it too as an example of how Manifold can be a framework for pico networks.
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Childproofing the Control Plane: Using Cedar to Build Frontal Lobes for Agentic Systems
Connecting an agent like OpenClaw to Home Assistant can make home automation more adaptive and intelligent, but it also introduces real risks if authority is not clearly bounded. By externalizing decision logic into deterministic Cedar policies, we can create governed autonomy that allows agents to act usefully while preventing them from crossing safety, security, and privacy boundaries.
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Childproofing the Control Plane: Using Cedar to Build Frontal Lobes for Agentic Systems
Connecting an agent like OpenClaw to Home Assistant can make home automation more adaptive and intelligent, but it also introduces real risks if authority is not clearly bounded. By externalizing decision logic into deterministic Cedar policies, we can create governed autonomy that allows agents to act usefully while preventing them from crossing safety, security, and privacy boundaries.
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Cloudless: Computing at the Edge
New use cases will naturally drive more computing away from centralized cloud platforms to the edge. The future is cloudless.
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Rule-Based Programming and the Internet of Things
Rule-based, actor model systems are a great match for IoT workloads.
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Monitoring Temperatures in a Remote Pump House Using LoraWAN
If you've got a sensor that isn't within range of wifi, then LoraWAN is a good solution. And event-based rules in picos are a convenient way to process the data.
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We Need a Self-Sovereign Model for IoT
The Internet of Things is more like the CompuServe of Things. We need a new, self-sovereign model to protect us from proprietary solutions and unlock IoT's real potential.
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Easier IoT Deployments with LoraWan and Helium
Connectivity requirements add lots of friction to large-scale IoT deployments. LoRaWAN, and the Helium network, just might be a good, universal solution.
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Toothbrush Identity
Identity finds its way into everything—even toothbrushes. Careful planning can overcome privacy concerns to yield real benefits to businesses and customers alike.
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Smart Property
Smart property is much more than the anemic connected things we have now. Smart property imagines a world where every thing participates in digital communities and ecosystems, working through programmable agents under the owners control.
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Ten Reasons to Use Picos for Your Next Decentralized Programming Project
Picos are a programming model for building decentralized applications that provide significant benefits in the form of abstractions that reduce programmer effort. Here are ten eleven reasons you should use picos for your next decentralized application.
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Announcing Pico Engine 1.0
I'm excited to announce a new, stable, production-ready pico engine. The latest release of the Pico Engine (1.X) provides a more modular design that better supports future enhancements and allows picos to be less dependent on a specific engine for operation.
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Relationships in the Self-Sovereign Internet of Things
DIDComm-capable agents provide a flexible infrastructure for numerous internet of things use cases. This post looks at Alice and her digital relationship with her F-150 truck. She and the truck have relationships and interactions with the people and institutions she engages as she co-owns, lends and sells it. These and other complicated workflows are all supported by a standards-based, open-source, protocol-supporting system for secure, privacy-preserving messaging.
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The Self-Sovereign Internet of Things
Self-sovereign identity offers much more than just better ways to log in. The identity metasystem is really a sophisticated messaging system that is trustworthy, secure, and extensible. While decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials have much to offer the Internet of Things (IoT), the secure messaging subsystem promises an IoT that goes well beyond those initial scenarios. This post gives and introduction to SSI and IoT. The follow-on post goes deeper into what a true Internet of Things founded on SSI can provide.
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Identity, Sovrin, and the Internet of Things
Building the Internet of Things securely requires that we look to non-hierarchical models for managing trust. Sovrin provides a Web of Trust model for securing the Internet of Things that increases security and availability while giving device owners more control.
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A Mesh for Picos
This post describes some changes we're making to the pico engine to better support a decentralized mesh for running picos.
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The New Pico Engine Is Ready for Use
The new pico engine is nearly feature complete and being used in a wide variety of settings. I'm declaring it ready for use.
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Sovrin Use Cases: Portable Picos
This article describes a method for using the Sovrin distributed identity ledger to lookup picos by name rather than location. This allows picos to be portable between hosting engines without loss of functionality.
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Pico Labs at Open West
We've built a mockup of a computer closet with temperature sensors and fans to demonstrate how pico structures can be used in the Internet of Things and to experiment with Wrangler, our pico operating system.
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Failure and the Internet of Things
Dealing with failure gracefully is table stakes for connected devices. My review of two connected sprinkler controllers shows that they're not yet ready to join the game.
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Fitbit as Gizmo
The networked devices you purchase aren't products as we've historically understood that term. You're not buying the device, you're buying the service. Fitbit is just a interface to a networked service. Without the service, the device is good for nothing.
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Notes from Gluecon 2016
Here are notes I live tweeted at Gluecon 2016.
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A Pico-Based Platform for ESProto Sensors
Spimes are a wonderful intellectual framework for thinking about the Internet of Things. This blog post shows how spimes can be created using picos and then applied to a sensor platform called ESProto.
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Promises and Communities of Things
Promise theory provides a tool for thinking about and structuring the code that implements communities in groups of social things. This blog post discusses some initial thinking about promises and picos.
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Reactive Programming with Picos
This is an introduction to picos as a method for doing reactive programming. The article contains many links to other, more detailed articles about specific topics. You can thus consider this an index to a detailed look at how picos work and how they can be programmed.
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Culture and Trustworthy Spaces
Culture is an important component of self-organizing systems. In this post, I explore this concept as it relates to the Society of Things I described earlier.
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Social Things, Trustworthy Spaces, and the Internet of Things
Social things interacting in trustworthy spaces represent a model for an Internet of Things that is scalable to trillions of devices and still works. This post describes that concept and proposes picos as a platform for building social things.
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Picos: Persistent Compute Objects
This brief introduction to picos and the components that make up the pico ecosystem is designed to make clear the high-level concepts necessary for understanding picos and how they are programmed.
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Sessions I Want to Hold at IIW
I'm going to hold a few sessions at IIW. Here's my list so far. And there's a homework assignment for the bureaucracy session.
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IBM's ADEPT Project: Rebooting the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things, only a few years old, needs a reboot. So says Paul Brody of IBM. The IBM Adept project is a proof of concept for an open, decentralized Internet of Things.
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Ambient Computing
Ambient computing is coming and it will have a bigger impact on your life than any change in the last 40 years.
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Self Sovereign Authorities and the Epic Struggle for IoT
I finished reading three things this week that all tied together in my mind and so I wanted to mention them. One is a full-length book, but the other two are short essays. This post describes them and my thoughts about how they relate to my earlier post on the CompuServe of Things.
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Events, Picos, and Microservices
I spoke at Apistrat 2014 today in Chicago on the Fuse architecture and API. Here are my slides.
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Fuse as a Model of the Vehicle Ecosystem
Fuse has been designed from the ground up to support relationships between the car and everything else in the vehicle ecosystem.
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The CompuServe of Things
On the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980's, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things?
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Substitutability is an Indispensable Property for the Internet of Things
Substitutability is a key feature of decentralized systems that give people real choice and build trust. The coming Internet of Things will be limited in what it can provide without it.
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Vehicles That Get Better Over Time
As software becomes a bigger and bigger part of everything, the rules have changed for manufacturers of durable goods. They will have to adapt to customers who expect things to be updated and fixed automatically. For car manufacturers, this means that if I don't feel like my car has gotten better in some ways, because the software in it has gotten better, you're going to lose me as a customer.
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Life Simplified with Connected Devices
Kelly Flanagan's lab at BYU did a concept video to show how connected devices simplify life. My son Bradford did the screen writing.
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Decentralized Systems: Thermoregulation in Bee Hives
I started monitoring the temperature of my beehive a few weeks ago. The result was a deeper appreciation for the beauty of decentralized algorithms.
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M2M for People
M2M has traditionally been about businesses managing the things they manufacturer, with end users only an after thought. But as the price of connecting things drops, much of what has been done for years in the M2M space, becomes possible for end users too. I call this M2M for People.
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Ambient Connectivity and the Internet of Things
Until we solve the problem of connectivity, the real potential of the Internet of Things will remain out of reach.
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Facebook for My Stuff
SquareTag is a social product platform. Social products have relationships with owners, manufacturers, and others. Social products promise to make things more useful and reduce the total cost of ownership.
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Build the World You Want to Live In
I gave a talk and then was on a panel at the Silicon Valley edition of the New Digital Economies conference on Wednesday. During the panel, I gave this challenge to the audience: you have an ethical responsibility to build the world you want to live in.
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The Internet of My Things Needs the API of Me
Creating the Internet of My Things will require that people gain an online presence: the API of Me. That's what personal clouds are all about.
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Forgetting to Water the Christmas Tree? How Personal Clouds Saved Christmas
A personal clouds with a cloud-based operating system provides an easy way to take water level signals from an Electric Imp to automatically notify a homeowner via SMS that his Christmas tree needs to be watered.
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Hacking the Philips Hue with KRL
Philips Hue is a connected lighting system. No sooner did I see it that I wanted to control my lights from my personal cloud. This blog post is about my initial experiments with controlling Hue using KRL.
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Talking Back to the Thermostat
The next step in my KRL thermostat experiment is to start sending the thermostat directives. This post describes a project to set the color LED according to the temperature trend.
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A Kynetx Endpoint for Radio Thermostats
The Internet of Things requires active participants--devices and services that are not just listening, but also talking. I've created a daemon that serves as a framework for linking to multiple connected devices and raising events based on their state.
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SquareTag: Making Everything Smart
Making every thing smart isn't science fiction, it's doable now and has startling possibilities to make the world a better place to live. SquareTag links things to personal clouds so they can be smart. When we give everything a virtual existence by means of an identity and a personal cloud, the entire world becomes our user interface.
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