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General suggestions or questions about the SparkFun Electronics website
By nardev
#159705
Hello,

I have been thinking for a while about this. I wonder what does other think about this.

IMHO, so far, Adafruit/Sparkfun is the company which can make something like this and that is why i'm posting this idea to both.

The easiest would be to write an example right away.

- John from TX has a arduino with ethernet shield and wants to share temperature in his room with others.
- Naoki from Japan wants to share seismic activity and radiation in his city.
- Teacher in PRIMARY SCHOOL IN ALASKA helped kids to make something and push data to the service too.
- Maria has FLORA and wants to share and permanently record her GPS position and some basic statistics of diodes from her clothes.
- Philippe from FR has Beaglebone and wants to share with others position of airplanes in his region via ADS-B receiver (http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works)
- Mark from CA has Raspberry Pi and wants to capture air pollution in his area and wants to share it with others.
- Matthew has a RF plane and wants to share where he flew during the weekend.
- Ivana from Boston wants to print out on thermal printer temperature from somebody sharing it in NYC
- Jeff from FL has beaglebone and he wants to share picture from his lab and share it.
- Mustafa from Egypt wants to share air pollution and temperature from his room.

And so on...

Goal is to make multipurpose community to which you can join if you have something interesting which you made and which data you want to share with others.

System:
- Should be free
- The system must have simple way of pushing/pulling data so that people don't loose focus on creating hardware.
- Community would have various APIs to push/pull data.
- Should me modular, so that it can handle pulling/pushing few kinds of analytics data, images, video stream (via ustream/sth. else), basic info like name, email and GEO coordinates.
- Should have easly to share options and easy integrate with Facebook and twitter.
- Web interface of community should have options to rate, comment and everything else, show the most interesting data and so on.
- Each user must have short description of his work and images of the device.
- There should be map with possibility to filter type of data and which will show active and inactive members so you can have simple overview of what is going on.
- Easiest would be to share weather forecast data but it should be supported for people to invent something cool to share too.

Outcome:
- Everyone would be pushed to learn, make some device, to invent something in order to join the network.
- People will see what others did and following their instructions they will also learn and make.
- People would will like the fact that they are members of something big and uniting the forces to create unique content together.
- As a company which is owner of the network, it can only be good for the business too :)

Although, there used to be COSM service, which was something similar to this, it's not focused on makers and community. It's more business now. Look at: www.xively.com
We need something more community oriented IMHO

What sparkfun think?
What the others think?
#159753
n1ist wrote:There are a number of alternatives to Pachube/Cosm/Xively. I use Thingspeak myself.
/mike
Nice,

however, i think that if sparkfun decides to create something like this, it can be real push for new users, customers and learning.