Two years ago, I was working on a research project called “Project Link” as part of the Connected Devices branch of Mozilla. While this branch has since been stopped, some part of Project Link lives on as Project Things. One of the parts of Project Link that hasn’t made it to Project Things (so far) was Thinkerbell: a Domain-Specific Language designed to let users program their SmartHome without coding. While only parts of Thinkerbell were ever implemented, they were sufficient to write programs such as: Whenever I press any button labelled “light” in the living room, toggle all the lights in the living room. or If the entry door is locked and the motion detector notices motion, send an alarm to my SmartPhone. Thinkerbell also had: semantics that ensured that scripts could continue/resume running unmonitored even when hardware was replaced/upgraded/moved around the house, including both the server and the sensors; a visual syntax, rather than a text syntax; a novel type system designed to avoid physical accidents; a semantics based on process algebras. Ideally, I’d like to take the time to write a research paper on Thinkerbell, but realistically, there is very little chance that I’ll find that time. So, rather than letting these ideas die in some corner of my brain, here is a post-mortem for Thinkerbell, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will pick some of the stuff and gives it a second life. Note that some of the ideas exposed here were never actually implemented. Project Link was cancelled while Thinkerbell was still in its infancy.

A few weeks ago, Mozilla pulled the plug on its Connected Devices Experiment: a bunch of internal non-profit hardware-related startups. One of our main objectives was to determine if we could come up with designs that could help turn the tide against the spyware-riddled and gruyère-level security devices that are currently being offered (or pushed) to unwary users. One of the startups was Project Lighthouse. We tried to provide an affordable, simple and privacy-friendly tool for people suffering from vision impairment and who needed help in their daily life.

It’s no secret that all projects die, eventually, and that most projects die before they have had a chance to have any impact. This is true of personal projects, of open-source projects, of startup projects, of hardware projects, and more. A few days ago, the IoT project on which I was working did just that. It was funded, it was open-source, it was open-hardware, and it still died before having the opportunity to release anything useful. In our case, we got pretty far, didn’t run out of funds, and were a little polish away from putting our first alpha-testers in front of a pretty advanced prototype before a higher-level strategy pivot killed a number of projects at once. Ah, well, risks of the trade. Still, working on it, we managed to learn or come up with a few tricks to increase the chances of surviving at least long enough to release a product. I’ll try to summarize and explain some of these tricks here. Hopefully, if you have a project, regardless of funding and medium, you may find some of this summary useful.

At its core, Lighthouse is an idea we have been discussing in Connected Devices: can we build a device that will help people with partial or total vision disabilities? From there, we started a number of experiments. I figured out it was time to braindump some of them. Our problem Consider the following example: How do we get from this beautiful picture of Mozilla’s Paris office to the text “PRIDE and PREJUDICE”, “Jane Austen”, “Great Books”, “Great Prices”, “$9.