Sweet-tasting Internet of Things

The perk of working in an agency with more than 50 people walking in and out the office regularly? There is always a reason to celebrate. Birthdays, project launches, beginning of summer, and so on. And with these reasons, there usually comes either booze, or … cake.

We love cake, and sweets in general. People bring them from all over the world, and you have to be fast to get them if they are being served in the kitchen.

Before we used Slack, there were mails like “Quick – It’s my birthday and I placed some caramel powder carrot cake muffins on the kitchen counter”. By the moment you were there, they would mostly be gone. Just as gone as group emails in this office by now, actually. But cake is still a regular thing, and since our last maker days, it’s Slackbot that brings us the good news:

At our first Maker Days earlier this year, a team of four built a little button which sits at a central place in the office, and if you press it (you better brought some sweets!), it will push a slack notification to everyone, and within a couple of seconds, the whole team will gather in the kitchen and enjoy some sweet dragée cotton candy tootsie roll pastry.

How was it built? The team – Robert, Oliver, Wanja and Steven – all don’t have a programming background, but a big passion for the internet of things: connecting something physical with something digital and bringing a digital environment back into the physical world. This seemed like an interesting challenge for a two day hacker marathon.

So they bought a pack of LittleBits, a modular set of small brick components (like sensors, buttons and connecting elements), that can be wired up and controlled through a graphical user interface. For the cake buzzer, LittleBits simply was connected to a service called If This Then That (short: IFTTT).

IFTTT lets you create “recipes” to perform simple but powerful actions. With the LittleBits and Slack integration, our cake buzzer knows when it is pressed, sends a request to IFTTT, which then again connects to Slack. Slack tells Slackbot to send an @channel message to everyone in our #general Channel, which – finally – will gather everyone in the kitchen to enjoy some macaroon powder gingerbread candy canes (or whatever cake is being served).

Here is what a recipe looks like:

This text was brought to you by the inspiring help of the Cupcake Ipsum random sweet name generator. Now, enjoy some cake …