Introduction

My name is Benjamin Sautner, and I am the president and founder of Nimbits. I started the Nimbits project in 2001 while I was working in the process control and automation industry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My job was to work with huge, multimillion dollar data acquisition and automation systems that were used to run city sized chemical plants around the country. I spent a lot of time working with plant workers who were never happy with the vendor's software interfaces and could never get to the data they needed to run the plant. I also worked with executives who were never able to get a clear, top level summary of the data they needed to make decisions. Lastly, I worked with the various IT infrastructure workers and CIOs who were spending countless millions on disaster recovery and scalability issues.

I started the nimbits projects after attending a data acquisition conference and being blown away by a vendor who showed how he hooked his house up to the same sort of software we used to run the chemical plants. I asked him how I could do this to my house and the answer was that I would need to invest over $10,000 USD just get started. So, I set out to write my own data acquisition system that did what these expensive systems couldn't do and met the following requirements:

• Free to get started and play around with for hobbyists and enthusiasts.
• No initial hardware investment.
• Out of the box, built in disaster recovery.
• Easily scalable, from zero to sixty.
• Open Source, extensible and customizable.
• Transparent, with no lock in.
• Social, community driven data feeds.
• Cool, with an easy to use interface with Mobility built in from the start.

Nimbits has been chugging along for over 4 years now and has evolved to handle more and more load as our user community has grown. Recent advances in its architecture means it is able to handle any amount of data we throw at it. Thanks to our users ideas and suggestions, we've added amazingly cool new features like integration into WolframAlpha, support for JQuery, and new web services that allow deep automation of the server.

Personally, I live and breath Nimbits, and pour over it's code every day. Nothing makes me happier than to see someone using it in a new way or logging data i've never thought of. My dream is to make Nimbits the place for sharing data and seeing our world in new ways. Enjoy!