IPFS pubsub + Blinkt! on resin

For quite a while I wanted to use IPFS (the Inter-Planetary File System) for something interesting. Since I’ve last checked, they’ve added publish/subscribe messaging to their distributed communication, and there were some people who already tried it for IoT communications.

Since it’s Friday, we were hacking on some stuff, so managed to make a small demo, of a resin.io device that connects to the IPFS network, subscribes to a topic that is named after its UUID, and based on the messages it receives, it turns on/off a Blinkt! light strip.

It worked out pretty well, and the setup is such, that it could be adjusted relatively easily from using Javascript in the actual “client” that is the light control to any other programming language that can talk to the

The repo linked above has detailed readme, future ideas, context, etc…

For good measure, the current source code is also stored onto IPFS at https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPuHh4kiifDeUKJPcdqjrzCYDtoiqv72U2JXgdxj89yAR

What do you think? How are your experiments with IPFS?

2 Likes

This is slick. I’ve been tinkering a bit with IPFS but haven’t gotten too far. Seeing something like this gives me a second wind. Kudos!

Yeah, IPFS is interesting, and it has a lot of potential, but it’s also not straightforward to get using in a project. I have a lot of ideas, and as with most versatile technologies, doing preliminary project and hacks to test the capabilities and limitations is very important.

If you make anything, we’d love to hear it, would be great if you can share it with us! :slight_smile: