Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices

Yesterday, the Mozilla IoT team announced that ‘Project Things’ is now out from its early experimental phase with a new name, ‘WebThings’. Mozilla WebThings is an open platform that allows you to monitor and control devices over the web.

This project by Mozilla is an open source implementation of Web of Things, which defines software architectural styles and programming patterns that allow real-world objects to be a part of the World Wide Web. The idea here is to create a decentralized Internet of Things by providing “things”, URLs on the web to make them linkable and discoverable.

Mozilla WebThings comprises of two components:

WebThings Gateway

WebThings Gateway is privacy and security-focused software distribution built for smart home gateways. It enables you to directly monitor and control your smart home gateways over the web, without relying on a middleman.

Mozilla further announced that WebThings Gateway 0.8 is now available for download. This release comes with a feature that allows users to privately log data from their smart home devices. This logged data can also be visualized with interactive graphs.

“This feature is still experimental, but viewing these logs will help you understand the kinds of data your smart home devices are collecting and think about how much of that data you are comfortable sharing with others via third-party services,” said Ben Francis, a Software Engineer at Mozilla.

This release also brings in new alarms capabilities for devices like smoke, carbon monoxide, and motion detectors. With this new feature, users can configure rules to alert them when an alarm is triggered while they are away or check whether an alarm is currently active.

The team has also started working on a new version of WebThings Gateway for OpenWrt, a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. This version will be designed to act as a WiFi access point itself, instead of just connecting to an existing wireless network as a client.

WebThings Framework

WebThings Framework is a suite of reusable software components using which you can build your own web things, which directly expose the Web Thing API. This makes them easily discoverable by a Web of Things gateway or client. It can then automatically detect the device’s capabilities and monitor and control it over the web.

These components are implemented in a range of languages including Node.js, Python, Java, Rust, and C++ (for Arduino).

To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by Mozilla.

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