Can the promise of free WiFi burst our personal mobile device bubbles, bringing unexpected Owl-iday cheer in the form of a spontaneous—collective—musical performance?
That's the premise behind our 2024 Owl-iday Special, which brought our team together to build something fun around our Briefcase Kit, which combines complementary IoT technologies with a capable WiFi access point.
It's a hootenanny!
Watch a chorus of devices play a tune (mostly) in harmony from their web browsers
In short, /owlidays2024 serves a webpage that allows all client devices to play the same MIDI file in sync, creating a spontaneous chorus where the instruments are divided among devices.
The Owl-iday magic is keeping the devices in sync, which is done with WebSockets and JavaScript. From a development standpoint, that's the most interesting and challenging programming aspect.
Each twinkling star is in fact an ambient wireless device processed by our Pareto Anywhere open source IoT middleware, running alongside. The more stars, the more things in the space, each twinkling proportionally to the received signal strength.
We did this in keeping with our annual Owl-iday tradition, highlighting the unique capabilities of the Briefcase Kit which we launched this year.
The Briefcase Kit includes a WiFi access point which supports a captive portal, allowing streamlined access to the network, and redirecting to a specific web page. Why not use this to spread Owl-iday cheer over a backdrop of ambient data!
Besides, Don was reely looking for an excuse to develop a synchronised mobile musical experience, and this proved an ideal occasion. 🤓
Yes, please do! Grab the code from /owlidays2024 and npm install & npm start.* Then point every web device in your home to port 3003 of the computer running the code and press Play! in the browser.
Sprinkle in some twinkle stars by running Pareto Anywhere on the same computer: just follow this tutorial.*
* The only prerequisite is Node.js.
Yes, please do! It's owl open source, so hack it to make something cool—and please tell us about it!
Happy 2024 Owl-idays!
As we write this, 2025 is shaping up to be a year of transformational change—for better or for worse—likely to be felt around the world.
It is our hope that change will bring people together, just like this project brought our team closer together, brought BLE, RAIN RFID & EnOcean Alliance IoT devices together as twinkling stars, and brought competing mobile platforms working together in harmony using the standards of the Web.
Perhaps it will even bring us together spontaneously humming "Fairytale in New York"?
Owl the best in 2025!