Inside of an industrial building in Turin, Italy resides Casa Jasmina, an open-source connected apartment where designers and tinkerers can test out their Internet of Things (IoT) and home-automation experiments.
Don’t start jumping to conclusions – there will be no flying appliances or talking refrigerators. Instead the goal is to encompass real-world, useful technologies for homeowners. Currently, the space is equipped with more than 15 IoT technologies. The two-year pilot project launched by Arduino and Toolbox is set up as a test bed for hackers and innovators to play with their digital projects.
When you step inside Casa Jasmina, you don’t just witness a traditional kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and library. Instead, “it’s a public interface for a larger Internet-of-Things process of building things, acquiring installing things, removing things, repairing and maintaining things, storing things, recording and linking to things, and, last but very importantly, getting rid of things,” according to Casa Jasmina’s website.
The project is designed to encourage the designers of future homes. Upon its opening, Casa Jasmina was furnished with some Maker furniture, a variety of Valcucine kitchen appliances, and a display of connected household objects.
Some of the devices inside include an LED lamp that’s built using a milk carton (no wires required) and an opto-artwork called “9 Random Spots” by Marco Brianzo that reveals patterns of colored lights that respond to changes in radiation (all using Arduino software to handle the data on the back-end).
Another goal of Casa Jasmina is for smart-home products to work effortlessly with one another. So, let’s say you want your home to run on Google Nest or any smart device from a single provider, for that matter; you’d have to ensure all of your devices are compatible. This can become costly and a nuisance. Wouldn’t it be great if all smart-home items could just work together as a team? That’s what Casa Jasmina aims for.
Casa Jasmina will be available for renters via Airbnb. Soon anyone can spend some time in the connected home of the future and get an idea of what it will be like to live “smart” on a day-to-day basis.
