Luxo Jr. ThingsBoard 🎬 Ep.1

Episode 1: The Prop That Came Alive

“The question is not whether a lamp can have a personality. The question is whether you are willing to do the work to give it one.”
— paraphrasing John Lasseter, very liberally

A Desk Lamp That Changed Everything 💡

In 1986, John Lasseter had a real Luxo brand desk lamp on his drawing table. He had been using it as a rendering model — studying how light fell on its surfaces, how its joints articulated. It was a prop. An inert object. A piece of hardware.

Then he gave it joints. He gave it movement. He gave it reaction — a curious tilt of the head when the ball rolled by, a deflated slump when the ball burst, an instant excited pivot when something bigger and bouncier appeared. He gave it a story.

Within two minutes of film, the audience at SIGGRAPH 1986 was on its feet screaming. Not because the lamp was technically impressive — though it was. Because they had forgotten it was a lamp. It had become, impossibly, something alive.

This is the precise ambition of the IoT platform ThingsBoard: to take your physical hardware — sensors, actuators, meters, controllers — and give them the equivalent of Lasseter’s joints. Telemetry. Attributes. Dashboards. Rules. Relationships. Commands. To animate the inert thing and turn it into something you can watch, understand, and direct.

In this series, we build stage props. We give them personality. By Episode 8, they will perform.

🗂️ SIPOC — The Stage

The Stage Props Metaphor 🎭

Every stage production has props — the physical objects on stage that the cast interacts with: lamps, chairs, telephones, clocks. A prop sitting in the prop house is inert. It has physical properties (weight, colour, shape) but no story, no behaviour, no relationship to anything else.

Bring the prop onto the stage and give it context:

• A position (where on the stage it sits)
• A character (what role it plays in the story)
• Joints (how it can move and change)
• Cues (when it does something — the lamp flickers when the villain enters)
• A place on the prompt book (the director’s master view of the whole production)

This is exactly what ThingsBoard does to a physical sensor or actuator:

Luxo Jr. had one prop — a desk lamp — and gave it so much personality that it became a mascot seen before every Pixar film for forty years. You have sensors, meters, and controllers. ThingsBoard gives them the same treatment.

What ThingsBoard Actually Is 🏗️

ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for data collection, processing, visualisation, and device management. It is production-grade: companies use it to manage tens of thousands of devices across smart energy, fleet tracking, agriculture, smart buildings, and industrial automation.

The key capabilities

Device connectivity — ThingsBoard speaks MQTT, HTTP, CoAP, LwM2M, and more. Any device that can transmit data via one of these protocols can connect. If it cannot, the ThingsBoard IoT Gateway (Python, open-source) acts as a translator.

Telemetry and attributes — Every data point a device sends is stored as a timestamped key-value pair. Device metadata (location, firmware version, thresholds) is stored as attributes — permanent properties rather than time-series values.

Dashboards and widgets — A rich, configurable UI for visualising your data: time-series charts, gauges, maps, alarm tables, entity lists, and custom widgets. Dashboards are built by wiring widgets to device telemetry and attributes.

Rule Engine — A visual, flow-based processing system. Incoming messages pass through chains of nodes that filter, transform, and react. An alarm fires. An email sends. A command goes back to the device. A Kafka message is published.

Entity model — Devices, Assets, Customers, Users, and more — all connected via typed relations. A building contains floors, which contain rooms, which contain devices. The hierarchy is modelled explicitly.

Alarms — When telemetry crosses a threshold, ThingsBoard creates an alarm, propagates it up the entity hierarchy, and notifies the appropriate users via the Notification Centre.

Which edition?

For this series, everything works on Community Edition and Cloud. Where PE-specific features appear, they are labelled.

ThingsBoard and Home Assistant: Two Stages, One Show 🏠

Home Assistant (HA) is your personal stage — the smart home controller that knows Rianne’s heating schedule, whether Beau and Elvis are in the garden, and which lights to turn off at bedtime.

ThingsBoard is the enterprise stage — built for industrial-scale telemetry, multi-tenant isolation, hierarchical entity models, and professional dashboards.

They are not competitors. They are collaborators. In Episode 7, we bridge them via MQTT — HA publishes its entity states to ThingsBoard’s MQTT broker. ThingsBoard ingests them as device telemetry, displays them on dashboards alongside other sensors, and applies alarm rules that HA has no native concept of.

The result: your home’s Luxo Jr. lamp plays alongside industrial-scale equipment on the same stage. The prompt book covers both.

The Series Map: Eight Episodes 🎬

The prop house is open. The stage is set. In Episode 2, we build the first set and register our first device.

🔗 Resources

• ThingsBoard website: thingsboard.io
• ThingsBoard Cloud (free tier): thingsboard.io/installations
• ThingsBoard docs: thingsboard.io/docs
• AI Solution Creator blog post: thingsboard.io/blog/ai-solution-creator
• Luxo Jr. (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxo_Jr.

🎬 Stage Props! is a series about ThingsBoard — the IoT platform that gives your devices joints, personality, and behaviour, the way John Lasseter gave Luxo Jr. a soul.