Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has attracted more and more attention. This is because the IoT technique can be widely used in a variety of applications, such as smart grid and intelligent transportation, healthcare, art, logistics, environmental monitoring and life. Today, the development of the IoT has been considered as one of the key technologies for improving the quality of daily activities of people. This paper firstly introduces the background and applications of the IoT and depicts the concept and architecture of the IoT. Then, this paper further presents the design and implementation of the Mushroom Networks, including the software, firmware and hardware designs. Several IoT technologies have been applied in the implementation of the mushroom node, including sensing, wireless communication and heterogeneous networking, making the Mushroom Networks to be a typical example of the IoT applied in art and culture domain.