A personal Heroku on local hardware to easily connect smart devices
Experimental Platform provides an easy way to deploy apps on local hardware without the hassle to setup the environment. It enables developers and makers to focus on the things that matter.
A personal Heroku on local hardware to easily connect smart devices launched on January 19, 2016 with 64 votes, #1,377 of 4,522 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.
In plain words
Experimental Platform is a local development environment built on CoreOS and Docker that allows developers and makers to deploy applications on personal hardware without complex setup. It simplifies IoT and smart device projects by eliminating the need to configure environments and learn unfamiliar APIs. The platform runs on local machines and uses standard technologies, enabling users to focus on building rather than infrastructure.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
For us, working on IoT projects always meant spending hours trying to fiddle around with environments, obscure device APIs and figuring out how to access them remotely with languages and frameworks we didn't know. So we decided to build an open development platform that makes the whole experience fun. It uses standard technologies like CoreOS and Docker and runs on your local machine. Here is the Experimental Platform : If you aren't already running the Experimental Platform, you will need to set it up. Luckily this is very easy: Once you have activated the sensor and smartlight, they will show up in the Device Manager . Don't worry if you don't have the hardware ready yet, we can skip this…from experimental-platform.github.io
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