A long-time friend of mine started playing with his Ambient Orb a year or so ago. At the time, he explained all sorts of details of how he'd setup a Windows service and .NET providers. I remember thinking, "wow, their API must be pretty complex".

While in Salt Lake City on vacation, I picked up an orb on sale for $50 and decided to investigate this on my own. Today, I finally got around to looking into the API, and implementing a client. After looking at the 'API' I decided on BASH to implement my client.

Spoiler: It's 2 lines of bash to retrieve our current daily customer count and post it to the ambient orb API. And, before you waste your time both my Orb ID and the database password have been changed.

After combining my 'service' with the ever powerful CRON, my Orb now updates every 15 minutes.
[tags]ambient orb, bash, intellicontact[/tags]