Open Pipe Kit
What is the Open Pipe Kit?
The Open Pipe Kit (OPK) developers are working on a set of documentation and software called the Open Pipe Kit that is going to empower thousands of data journalists and civic hackers to collect data without needing a programmer's assistance or being locked into one data platform from a proprietary turn-key solution.
Who are the OPK developers?
The Open Pipe Kit developers are programmers and electrical engineers that have been building environmental monitoring solutions for data journalists and civic hackers for years. They have now figured out a way to empower 95% of these use cases with one piece of software and instructions known as the Open Pipe Kit.
How can I get started?
When the Open Pipe Kit is ready, the Open Pipe Kit documentation will illustrate how you can assemble Pipes from $60 of readily accessible parts. Choose a sensor from the list of supported sensors, plug it into the Pipe, and then use your smartphone to configure the Pipe to send data to a location of your choosing. If the sensor you're hoping to use isn't on our list of supported sensors, someone with programming knowledge can contribute a driver for that sensor back to the Open Pipe Kit project. It's Open Source!
When the Minimum Viable Product for the Open Pipe Kit is ready, what can I expect to find?
- Documentation on how to assemble the hardware for a Pipe.
- A disk image you can easily burn to an SD Card for a Raspberry Pi Linux computer that will include all the OPK Engine and the OPK User Interface.
- Half a dozen Sensor drivers for sensors for the pluggable sensor platform known as Grove. We'll utilize Dexter Lab's GrovePi shield to allow the Grove sensors to be pluggable on Raspberry Pi. This will make Grove sensors plug & play! We'll also
- Grove Dust sensor driver
- Grove Moisture sensor driver
- Grove Loudness sensor driver
- Grove Temperature and Humidity sensor driver
- Grove Air Quality sensor driver
- Don Blair's Water Depth sensor driver for our friends in New Orleans who need flood alarms
- Data Reservoir Drivers that allow users to configure wether they want to store data locally or remotely, and if remotely, on which server.
- CSV data reservoir driver, for local data storage or over email
- Dat data reservoir driver, for local and/or remote data storage
- Apitronics Hive database (uses CouchDB) reservoir driver, for local and/or remote data storage
- Xively reservoir driver, for external data storage
- A trigger system built into the User Interface that allow users to set up text message alarms for situations such as "Is the water depth over x height?"
The Open Pipe Kit Manifesto
Our mission is to develop a kit for building Pipes that ...
Empower non-programmers to collect data from a large selection of sensors. Other systems require programming to set up data collection.
Give users multiple data storage options. Fight vendor lock-in by giving users the freedom to choose where their data flows. Other proprietary turn-key systems lock users' hardware to one proprietary data service.
Spur innovation by giving programmers the freedom to write additional sensor and database drivers. Other systems require users to buy and use their own proprietary sensors and databases.
The Internet has often been compared to a system of pipes. Imagine that these pipes carry water: for someone interested in collecting water from a local river in order to store it for later use, then, to date, nearly all the "Internet of Things" sensor data solutions are like companies that sell customers proprietary pipes and fittings designed to transport the user's water (sensor data) to a remote, hidden reservoir (a cloud-based server); and typically the user is then required to pay a fee in order to access this now-remote resource.
We believe it is vital for people in the fields of sensor journalism, environmental monitoring, and agriculture to have full control over the data they collect, and to be able to use reliable, easily-acquired, open source hardware and software that can be modified and repurposed without permission.
The Open Pipe Kit is a system designed to meet this need, based on a Raspberry Pi and Node.js. Users of OPK will be able to collect data from sensors and store it either locally (on microSD) or remotely on a server of their own choosing.