MozFest 2015 Demo Garage: Showing What’s Possible with the Open Web

Mozilla Festival 2015 was a productive and dynamic event celebrating the world's most valuable public resource - the open Web. MozFest is also a gathering place for Mozilla community members from around the world and brings together makers, designers, builders, coders and creative folks to showcase their ideas of how the Web can enable the sort of innovative tinkering you might do (or want to do) in your own garage.

In fact one of the many exciting exploration spaces at MozFest was a demo zone we called "The Garage". Here we had a steady stream of demos, workshops and spontaneous conversations about a wide-range of maker movement topics including 3D printing, robotics, sensors, connected devices, digitally discovering the world around us, and open hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Naturally the Web, JavaScript, Firefox and Firefox OS were featured prominently in those experiences, a few of which we wanted to share.

First up Developer Kannan Vijayan showed me FlyWeb, an experiment that enables loading Web content using a peer to peer connection from one smartphone to another:

Also you'll remember we were excited to work with Panasonic to launch Panasonic VIERA Smart TVs powered by Firefox OS earlier this year. Product Manager Joe Cheng showed me how Firefox OS performs on a smart TV:

Next up Product Manager Cindy Hsiang and team showed me a series of demos showcasing use of JavaScript to program connected devices and sensors through a common microcontroller such as Arduino. Evan Tseng built WotMaker, a general-purpose development tool to facilitate maker-style prototyping, and Eddie Lin leveraged an open source framework to build an automatic cat feeder and a small robot that could be controlled wirelessly from a simple web application running on a smart phone.

Blog Post from Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation
MozFest 2015: Connecting Leaders and Rallying Communities for the Open Web