Fox Boston ran an in-depth report on the initial results of the Cape Light Compact pilot that our GroundedPower project installed in 100 homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. We’re now taking this to at least six more municipal utilities, tripling the size of the pilot program. GroundedPower focuses on customer engagement—employing technology as a means to creating a desirable behavioral outcomes, in this case supporting energy efficiency in homes and businesses.
Original Internet Coffee Maker
The Hammersmith Group just published a nice overview of the potential for connected devices by Constantine Valhouli dubbed “The Internet of things: Networked objects and smart devices.” It quotes myself, Julian Bleecker, Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield and covers devices from the WineM to Botanicalls to the Ambient Orb along with the original online coffee pot. There’s a variety of other interesting research papers on this site, including the one that quotes me.
The final projects for my Fundamentals of Physical Computing class at SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program are now all posted online. (You can also view the documentation from their labs for this foundation class.) They were a great group of students and I’m looking forward to seeing all the interactive magic they’ll create going forward. In the meantime, check out:
- Touchstone by Angela Huang, Jeff Kirsch and John Finley
- Mindful by Beatriz Vizcaino, Colleen Miller, Gene Lu and Stephanie Aaron
- InterFACE by Carmen Dukes, Clint Beharry, Evinn Quinn, Katie Koch and Kristin Graefe
- Breaktime by Chia-Wei Liu, Michael Katayama and Richie Lau
- …and the mystical Tarot Trunk by Derek Chan, Eric Onge and Russ Maschmeyer
People ask a lot, so here’s the ZTerm settings that work well for me. The screen I skipped have no impact on what we’re usually doing. The last screenshot shows how to save the settings. Yes for some reason they put it on the Dial menu.
Be sure to pick the appropriate serial port. Holding down the shift key on the keyboard while the application is launching will display a prompt to choose the serial port.
The Mac OS is desperately in need of an open-source replacement for ZTerm, which hasn’t been updated in eight years. A friend of mine is working on a total new Macintosh serial program, so hopefully there can be an announcement about that in the near future.
On August 24th, the current ITP community will embark on another 4-in-4 event, every participant creating four different creative projects in four days. Each day’s project will be crafted, named, documented and shared publicly in just one spin of the globe.
As an instigator of this madness, I just launched a collection of information for those participating in or running a 4-in-4 event. This new 4-in-4 Guide tells what it is, how to run one and offers some advice for participants. Think of it as a starter mix from which you can cook up your own 4-in-4. It’s a work in progress. Comments and suggestions warmly welcomed.
Also, look for the upcoming bonsai version, a 1-in-1 event for alumni and students at ITP’s 30th Anniversary celebration, all day on October 2nd.
Congratulations to my students on some excellent achievements in our summer Sociable Objects Workshop at ITP. They created a full-floor permanent mesh network in a single day, then used it to concoct a toilet-activated display fountain for water conservation over a mere weekend. In the last weeks of class these hotshots produced five final projects including a sand painting sourced from distributed sound sensors, an anti-confusion teaching feedback mechanism, a musical instrument played from networked kites, a wearable dance photography system for capturing leaps, and a relationship-enhancing networked pedometer. (Links to be added as documentation becomes available.)
Everything they did was with full ZigBee protocol so they are now armed with the basic skills to create interactive wireless networks of any size for their amazing purposes.
My presentation for this year’s New York City BarCamp was Fog of Bar, a hands-on workshop in the creation of Dry Ice Martinis. BarCamp is an tech un-conference and had nothing whatsoever to do with bars until I got on the case. We were able to prepare about forty dry ice “martinys” along with a full-size demonstration model. Yummy.
If you try this at home of course, use caution as contact with dry ice can cause cold burns. For extra safety you can wait to drink the martini it until all the ice has sublimated away. Dry ice martinis are not recommended for children under 12, or at any time while operating the space shuttle.
Thanks for assistance from volunteer barbacks Alicia and Adam. Also Fog of Bar benefitted from short-notice testing by friends Max, Mike, Adam and Sean, and received its essential inspiration from Patrick Buckley and his Hungry Scientist Handbook. Here’s more photos:
Photo credits: Mike Dory, Eric Skiff and me
Nick Hardeman at Parsons put my clock code in a monster. His sun-bringing Morning Monster is awfully cute, but I’m still suspicious that something nefarious might be lurking behind those button eyes…
He’s got a video of it serving up sunshine.
<
I was recently photographed and “grilled” by ComputerWorld’s Sara Forrest. Her article was published today, complete with my appreciation for Jimmy Carbone’s restaurant, the Inuit people and tomato seeds. My thoughts about sociable objects, GroundedPower, mesh networking and reconnecting to nature can be read online here:
The Grill: NYU’s Rob Faludi wants your toaster to befriend your smoke alarm – ComputerWorld
PDF version:
PDF: Faludi ComputerWorld
The XBee Terminal Max is an improved version of the original XBee Terminal for Processing that features a much bigger screen, scrolling text areas, interactive serial port management and helpful reminder messages.
Thanks to Max Whitney for generating many of the improvements and Tom Igoe for the original code.
