Hi everyone, and welcome back to Geek Time. 歡迎回來《極客時間》. Hi, Brad.

Hey Lulu, how's it going?

Yeah, it's good, it’s good. So what are we gonna talk about today?

Today we're gonna be talking about the internet of things or IoT.

The internet…The IoT中文叫做物聯網。internet是互聯網，IoT, internet of things 是物，就是物件的物，物聯網.

I mean, I have seen the definition somewhere and it seems to be referring to all the things are connected rather than the computers. Could you walk us through the basic definition of IoT?

So, basically, IoT is just a group of things that are interconnected. They can be on the internet or through their own network, but it's not computers. It's like devices that have sensors in them and software that they used to communicate.

And so it might be a button somewhere that you push and it communicates with something, or it might be a temperature sensor that we used to find out the weather in our smartphones.

So, is it like one of those, for example, if I've got like a smart fridge refrigerator, that can be part of IoT?

Right. Yeah. That's one of those IoT devices.

Emm. And IoT means they are actually able to connect with each other and what communicate?

Yeah. They basically they inter communicate on their own. When we use the internet, we go online and we look up Information, but an IoT device connects to the internet or through another network, and sends Information to a hub or to another device directly, without any human interaction necessarily.

Okay, starts to sound a bit creepy. So my refrigerator can be sending things about my home to another refrigerator, for example, your refrigerator?

Well. It's not just gonna go talk to another refrigerator. However, you know you have your phone, and you probably have an APP on your phone that you can use to connect to the refrigerator, and then look at what's inside of your refrigerator or maybe your refrigerator will send you some Information saying “you only have two eggs”, you might want to order two more or more.

I see. I mean that was a bit of a joke.

Yeah.

But, what are some of the common IoT devices that we are using right now? You are saying that these are devices with sensor or software.

Yeah. A very common IoT device that many people have in their homes would be something like an Alexa, some sort of personal assistant, you say “Alexa, play this song”, right? And then, Alexa will do something for you; or it'll look up Information, it'll look up a recipe.

But you basically... it has a microphone, whenever you speak to it, it will listen to what you say and then make a query based on that Information.

Remind of me, Alexa is the Google one, isn't it?

It might be, I think it's Amazon.

Oh. It's the Amazon one.

Yeah.

Okay. Alexa就是這種語音的小助手. Basically all the platforms have them.

Yeah.

A lot of my apps they like my, I don't know if that's even satellite navigation is, you know the GPS thing. When you're driving your car, you get like this map APP. And then you can also call out the voice controller. So that can be part of the IoT.

Yeah. So, those devices are IoT devices. You mentioned your fridge. There is also a... several other smart devices such as a doorbell cam or a smart lock. A lot of people wear things like fit bits.

Oh, the activity TRACKER, 運動手環.

Yeah. It'll monitor your heart rate or your other types of activity, how many steps you take, and then it will usually connect to a database ,and it will upload that Information to the database every 15minutes, every hour, just depends on how often you set it to.

Woo. Sounds like my 運動手環, my activity TRACKER is gonna be talking smack about me to my fridge. It's like she needs to eat more salad.

Haha. Oh, no, no.

All right. So jokes aside, it does sound like a lot of these IoT internet of things, devices are related to the idea of like smart home, smart life?

Yeah. When you think about home automation, you can think about it. Your lights, your air conditioning can all be controlled by IoT devices. And, this kind of thing can make your life much easier. When I leave my house in the morning, my air conditioning, I have to turn it off and I have to think about how many hours that I'm gonna be gone. And then I have to set it to turn on about half an hour before I come home. Whereas if I had an IoT device for that, I could just be like I'm gonna be home in about half an hour, I'll just turn it on now.

In the same way, you can... I know some of those smart homes, you can even run yourself a bath, like 20 minutes before you get home, you can start setting up the bathtub and everything. And you can control basically a lot of like energy resource management, you can do with that level of home automation.

If you're not in a room for 5minutes, it'll turn off the light in the room. If you're gonna wash your clothes, you can, in the US there's different pricing sometimes depending upon when you use your electricity, if you use the electricity at night, you get charged less. And so a lot of times you'll set your washing machine or your dryer to work overnight. And that way you pay less for the electricity on those things.

I see, I see. By the way, just a side note, Brad, if situations permit, would you want to live in one of those ultra smart homes?

No.

Why... are you scared of all your devices started gang up on you?

I think of movies and where people get stuck in like a smart house or something like that. And I wanna be in control of my own home. I wouldn't mind having a few things being having like some smart devices, but I wouldn't wanna have like an ultra smart home.

I would just wanna have like some simple things, maybe have an automatic coffee grinder. I don't know if you've ever heard of a man named Pee-wee Herman, he passed away recently. But, at the beginning of one of his movies, his entire breakfast regimen is all set up by kind of like an automated system. And I thought that kind of things should be cool.

Breakfast machine.

Yeah. Have your entire breakfast made by a machine, that would be fun. Yeah.

Wow, and do you think that in the future there will be more IoT devices?

I'm pretty sure there will be. I'm not quite sure what the future of the devices will be, but there is always going to be room for IoT devices.

Emm. I've heard it somewhere. You can make your own IoT devices?

I actually have.

How did you do that?

Yeah.

You have, okay, last time you told us when we were talking about drones, 無人機, 我們上回討論的時候, Brad, you said you've made your own drone, basically quad copters and that really was impressive. What about this? Make your own IoT devices? What did you make?

It's kind of a joke. The device actually just detected differences in like concentrates in the gas or like in the atmosphere. Basically, I could use it to detect farts or flatulence. I called it the flatulence detector. Haha.

你做了一個“聞屁機”？Oh my god.

Hahaha.

That is the ultimate waste of time. But, you know, again, I'm not gonna ask you why you made it. You feel Free to do whatever that entertains in your spare time. But how did you make it an IoT device?

So, basically, you have a controller. And you have to do a little bit of programming with it. And you get a sensor that connects to it. And some of them are really difficult to use the sensor that I use was actually quite difficult to program. Because you had to like, you had to turn it on to catch the data, and then you had to turn it off for a certain amount of time to collect the data, that one is a little bit more difficult. But most devices are actually quite simple. You just turn it on, collect data, you turn it off. And so, most of the programming is if you can understand very basic programming, you just, you basically plug and play with the programs that are there.

Oh, ok. So, basically you don't have to write it. Am I to understand that you don't have to write it from scratch?

Right.

You have existing, shall we say code available that you can sort of reassemble them? Is that... am I understanding that correctly?

Sometimes all you have to do is just look at the code and then type in a number, like I want it on for 60 seconds. It'll have like someone already have all written the code and then you just have in the parentheses, you put in 60 and then it'll turn it on for 60seconds.

I see.

But now if you want to, you could get more deep into that, but some of it's really simple. And if you just watch a few videos on the internet, you can learn how to do it.

Yeah. But I probably if I learned to do it, I probably wouldn't make something that detects farts.

I did it for a school project. We had to design something that detected something and then did something as a result of detecting that. So, me and my friend went to get some Mexican food to test it. And basically, whenever it detected a fart, it would turn on a fan, so it would basically be a way of cleaning the air after someone farted.

Oh, my god. That actually has some market value.

Yeah.

I'm sure it's gonna become quite popular in Japan.

My teacher loved it.

Yeah. I mean, after all they do have a specific sort of like music play or whatever in the toilet to mask the sound of you doing the business, right?

Yeah. Exactly.

All right. So we're gonna wrap up here with the basic episode of internet of things. We went through some basic concept and got to find out how geeky Brad actually is. And, In the advanced episode, I think we might be able to get into perhaps the more negative side or some of the risks, security risks especially with IoT.

All right, thanks everyone. And I will see you in the next episode.

We'll see you in the advanced episode.