littleBits makes it easy for people to experiment and play with a variety of DIY electrical components. It’s fun and easy, and yesterday they made it even better by introducing the littleBits cloudBit.

The cloudBit is a unique and powerful way anyone can create fun Internet of Things style solutions for whatever is important to them.  Today, I’m going to create a fun alert that fires when new Leads are added to Salesforce.

Let’s take a look at the bit itself.  It has the same basic architecture as other bits — magnetic connectors on both sides with a direction indicator — and then a USB wifi connector on the front and a 4GB micro SD card on the back containing Linux.

Yes, that’s right, Linux. In fact, as the description notes, “The cloudBit is a single board computer running Linux.”  Later they also note, “We’ve left pads on the bottom of the board so that you can connect to the cloudBit’s serial console using 3.3V UART (8-N-1, 115,200 baud) and poke around.”  OK, that’s now on my //TODO list.

Front:

Back:

 

Configuring the WiFi is pretty easy. When you first power on your cloudBit, it creates a new hotspot. You connect to that hotspot, and then configure it to connect to whatever your local setup is. This is a familiar pattern for a lot of new connected devices, so you’ll probably find it easy.  Once you’ve configured it, the basic operation is pretty simple, as I demonstrate in the video below.

Ok those are the basics. So, you might be asking, what can you do with it?

Quite a bit as it turns out.  I like to create fun things in Salesforce, so I decided to create a real world alert that tells me when a new Lead is added to the system.  I did this using a cloudBit, Twilio and LEGO. Check out this video for a demo and an explanation.

There you have it.  There’s really no meaningful code required, it’s mostly done with a few clicks.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can get a littleBits cloudBit for $59 and try out the Twilio Salesforce integration for free.