Abusing the Internet of Things

Chapter 7. Secure Prototyping—littleBits and cloudBit

With the announcement of the first-generation iPhone in 2007, Apple single-handedly disrupted the smartphone industry. From an external viewpoint, the iPhone announced in 2007 may very well have been the first version of the finished product visible to the public. However, the initial product idea that eventually led to the iPhone was a touch-sensitive tablet that would allow users to do away with a physical keyboard. Once Steve Jobs saw the prototype of the tablet, he decided he wanted to implement the technology on a smartphone first.

Prototypes help us think through the relevancy of our ideas by helping us focus our intellectual capacities on the intention of our conceived product. The great thing about creating prototypes is that the process can help us quickly realize potential roadblocks to the design of the final product early on. Prototyping, just as in the case of Apple and Jobs, can also help us test different versions of an idea, which may result in a whole other form factor than what we originally planned.

There are numerous platforms and kits available that allow individuals to prototype ideas for IoT products with minimal cost and effort. In this chapter, we are going to focus on the littleBits platform since it is one of the simplest and most elegant prototyping solutions in the market. The littleBits module includes magnets that can be snapped together like LEGO bricks, which allows us to construct a prototype ...