Blog

Nov

26

2013

Dreamforce Means Connected Devices Are A Thing

by Ron Evans

As mentioned in our last blog post, we had a team demonstrating Cylon.js at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week. At over 130,000 people registered, it is one of the largest tech conferences in the world! We had received a special invitation to be part of the first Connected Device Lab which was a unique location within the conference dedicated to important companies in the emerging "Internet of Things".

The first day of the conference, we "unleashed" cylon-force, an open-source adaptor that lets you connect a Cylon.js program to a Salesforce connected application. While many companies are still talking about the future, our hardworking team of humans and robots is already building the platform.

Our team showed a demonstration that we called the "Robot Economy". We had some Sphero robots bounce around inside an enclosure, and every collision we counted as a virtual dollar earned. Like a robotic "fight club". Cylon.js would then upload that to a Salesforce connected application we nicknamed the "First Galactic Bank of Sphero". The sales totals we would then push to a Pebble smart watch, to a small app we had programmed using the new Pebble SDK 2.0 Beta.

In other words, we demoed Cylon.js combining Pebble wearable tech, Sphero connected devices, and a Salesforce line of business application. Live. As you might imagine, Dreamforce attendees went crazy! The future is already here, dear friends.

Because we had so many hours of back to back demos (10+ hours a day!!!), we ended up demoing for thousands of people. Not kidding.

But that was not enough for our intrepid team. The last 2 days, we raised the level, and added a Crazyflie nanocopter into the mix. Whenever we flew the Crazyflie, we pushed data into the Salesforce connected app using our open source software. We had set up a "perimeter" of Spheros, and turned them red to warn the humans whenever the quadcopter was in flight, or green when the drone would land. We also pumped some of the telemetry info into the Pebble smart watch. The Dreamforce team was kind enough to let us out in front of the entire Connected Device Lab in the mornings before too much traffic made us retreat to the booth. First connected Salesforce drone? Yes!

Thank you very much to Reid Carlberg and everyone else at the Salesforce team who ran the Dreamforce Connected Device Lab, for a job well done. We appreciated being part of such a monumental event, and it should seem obvious now to everyone that devices are now a "thing".