Chris Meringolo and Brian Jepson share a hands-on journey from idea to prototype

In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with Chris Meringolo, an engineer at ThingWorx, and Brian Jepson, an editor at O’Reilly Media. This conversation took place during the LiveWorx 2016 conference, where the three of us presented a hands-on connected-device tutorial that we’re calling the O’Reilly IoT Learning Lab.

The Learning Lab tutorial walks through a basic IoT illustration that starts with an ordinary Raspberry Pi 3—a $35 single-board computer—and a handful of sensors. It takes less than an hour to connect the Pi to the ThingWorx platform and start streaming data to the cloud in real time. (If you’re interested in seeing the course booklet for the in-person workshops that were held at LiveWorx, you can find it here.)

Related links:

• The AR platform Vuforia
• The ThingWorx Developer Portal
• The Inventables X-Carve CNC router, Jepson’s favorite tool
• Meringolo’s two favorite tools: an Opinel pocket knife and a laser cutter for acrylic

This week’s click spirals:

• Brian Jepson: uranium glass—which is, as the name suggests, glass with trace amounts of uranium in it, and Geiger counters for Arduinos and Raspberry Pis.
• Chris Meringolo: researching the many varieties of hops for homebrewing.
• Jon Bruner: The MS Stockholm, an ocean liner that collided with the SS Andrea Doria in 1956 and is, remarkably, still in passenger service as the MV Astoria. The final generation of classic ocean liners met generally ignominious fates: among others, the RMS Queen Elizabeth burned in Hong Kong’s harbor in 1972, and the SS United States—which still holds the record for fastest westbound crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, is rusting in Philadelphia.

This podcast episode is a collaboration between O’Reilly and ThingWorx. See our statement of editorial independence.