What even Is this? It doesn't do a good job at explaining itself!

Here's a guy who's done a pretty cool project with Node-RED, an Arduino, a Raspberry PI and Minecraft: http://blogg.bouvet.no/2014/08/04/node-red-how-it-simplifed-...

It's a bit of a dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8310536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6384699

It is an IBM-sponsored integration tool, with a focus on small IOT-type devices and REST APIs (though it doesn't preclude anything else you can write a JS connector for). It's based on Node.js and is intended to be run on-premise (or even embedded).

"Small devices" and "Node.js" seem to be kind of orthogonal in my view.

Like a more hardware focused IFTTT?

Well, the hardware focus is part of it, but the flow of data between the activity blocks can be as convoluted as you want, rather than simply "IF this THEN that" (granted I don't know IFTTT well enough to know how convoluted it can be).

Not sure if that helps. FWIW, I'm not associated with the project but I have had some exposure to it.

This is just awesome! It reminds me of Yahoo Pipes, but a lot better, because, self-hosted and embeddable.