As mentioned in a previous post, the last couple of months have been filled with tons of developers talking to me about their ideas for pervasive applications. Sentilla has been busy building applications for large industrial customers, working to increase efficiency and decrease costs. But every once in a while, we come up for air and build some fun pervasive applications that we deploy in our world headquarters. With all of these applications, most with only a few lines of code, I started wondering: where should we put them?

This thought process has led to Sentilla Labs, a new website launched today that showcases all of the different applications that our developers are building. Sentilla Labs is full of developer-contributed applications (developers retain the rights to their ideas and code) with details on how they built the application, which sensors were used, and even code for you to download and try it out for yourself.

I categorize the applications on Sentilla Labs into three buckets:

1. Bite-sized versions of large-scale industry applications. One project is a refrigerator monitor. It uses two pervasive computers -- one inside a refrigerator and one outside -- to alert us when someone leaves the fridge door open. The same application has been used to retrofit large industrial refrigeration systems to save energy and control temperature.
2. Developer applications and prototype hardware. If you've wanted to set up a sensor to detect when your kids come home late at night, here's the plan. The Motion Detector project uses a Radio Shack infrared detector to alert you when there's movement. Think of it as a programmable home security system. You could extend it to turn your lights on and off, just like in your office.
3. Fun applications. No software product is complete without the presence of a game. And what game is more fitting than the classic, Pong. Built using accelerometers in the Sentilla Perk kit, two people go head-to-head and the score is shown on their pervasive computing "paddle". One of my favorite applications to demo!

Everything is built using Sentilla Perk which is available for $199. The kit comes with the full Sentilla development environment for pervasive Java, and you can download the code from Sentilla Labs and run it in a few minutes. Be sure to contribute your ideas back, we'd love to see what great things you've built.