RESTduino is a little Arduino sketch I wrote a few years back for the Arduino Ethernet shield. The idea was to make it easy for web developers to talk to the Arduino hardware using a REST-style interface.
The other day when I logged into Github I saw a big string of people starring the project, which surprised me because it’s a bit old and I haven’t updated it in awhile. Turns out that someone recently used RESTduino as an ingredient in a recipe for opening and closing their garage door using Siri (with a particularity clever way of working around Siri’s lack of a public API).
While I was poking around in the Github stats I also ran across a company selling an integrated Arduino/WiFi board called “ WiLD FiRE “ that ships with RESTduino as the stock firmware, how cool!
There’s just something really awesome about finding your work out there making it easier for people you don’t know to build cool things. I remember hesitating publishing RESTduino because I thought it was too simplistic, something anyone could write if they bothered, or too incomplete/buggy/etc. Finding examples of it taking on a life of its own like this is an awesome reminder of the power of open-source, and that you should share as much of your work as you can regardless of what you think it may be worth.
- Jason