How-To: Control AC Appliances with Spacebrew

When I visited the Intel booth at International CES in January, I was introduced to Spacebrew, a software toolkit for connecting interactive things to one another. It’s what linked up all the ultrabook screens that represented the leaves of a beautiful, metallic tree at the corner of the booth. The folks at Rockwell Group’s Lab are the ones who brought Intel’s tree to life and created Spacebrew. They just posted this tutorial on how to use Spacebrew to control AC devices using a PowerSwitch Tail connected to an Arduino and a computer running Processing.

Once you’ve connected the PowerSwitch Tail to the Arduino and uploaded the code, you connect the Arduino to your computer. A Processing library makes it easy to connect your project to Spacebrew, where you can drag connections between publishers (such as a button on a webpage) and subscribers (such as the Power Switch Tail).