Botanicalls is continuing with open source initiatives on several fronts. We’re applying for the Rhizome commission and members should remember to vote…for us…so that we can continue to bring humans closer to the natural world.
There’s also serious work underway to make kits available to the public, spurred along by an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. More announcements on that front soon. While you’re waiting, please vote!
Robofest is a “day-long event for youth exploring the creative world of robotics.” Kate, Jenny, Max and I were asked by Vision Ed Inc board president Marianne Petit to be judges for the DANCING WITH THE ROBOSTARS competition at Sony Wonder Technology Lab in New York City. The five competing teams of children each built dancing Lego robots, and choreographed routines for themselves to dance along with their creations. We witnessed a medieval swordplay performance, Hawaiian surfing dance, video game emulation, disco mash-up and a funk collaboration. The young inventors learned their robotics skills under the tutelage of Laura Allen, through Vision Ed Inc in New York. We loved it so much that we gave everyone a prize.
I delivered an updated version of my Designing Attraction talk on Friday evening, as part of the Speaker Series that we host. There were a some slick signs up in advance of the talk, and it was publicized online as well, so I was pleased to serenade a decent crowd. Designing Attraction is a class that I’m working on producing about how to apply our knowledge of human decision-making to create projects that attract, engage and persuade people. The talk was streamed live over the Internet, and a video archive is available online. I’m working on building out a syllabus next so I can add this class to my teaching portfolio.
This summer I’ll be teaching a graduate class called Sociable Objects at NYU that includes pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about the XBee radios including ZigBee. Here’s the course description:
Sociable objects are devices that share. They can talk to each other, gain information about their context and react accordingly. Recent advances in wireless mesh networks have created the potential for a massively interconnected world of easy information sharing. Cheap communications, high reliability, unique addressing, small size, standardization, and routing features combine to enable exciting new interactions. Developers of toys, wearables, performance devices, portables, network objects and sensor arrays can take advantage of radio mesh networking to design more interesting, better informed and more complex behaviors for their projects. This course explores devices that connect with and respond to each other. The technical focus will be on 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless mesh networks. Interconnections with other platforms and devices will be examined as appropriate. Students will gain an expertise in all functions of the ZigBee system to facilitate smart and novel behaviors in their projects. Through a series of weekly exercises, students will build skills and explore the challenges and delights of mutual connectivity. As a final project, the class will construct dynamic device networks. Prior experience with basic electronics and physical computing is helpful, but not required. Most labs and projects involve group work, so students should be ready to collaborate extensively as they experiment on the cutting edge of device interaction.
Also be sure to check out ITP’s excellent summer Soft Circuits course and the Studio in Prototyping. Either would make a great double-header with Sociable Objects. Summer classes at ITP are open to everyone so now’s a good time to sign up.
I’ve been working on an idea for an ITP class that explores the psychology of human decision-making, and applies this powerful science to interaction design. The best way to learn something is to teach it, so on Sunday I did the first run of an hour-long presentation on the subject at BarCampNYC3. I talked about biases, heuristics and Cialdini’s “weapons of influence” including social-proof, reciprocity and a host of other persuasive methods. The slides for this trial run gave a rough overview of decision-making psychology, after which we had a spirited discussion of examples and ethics. The next version is going to conclude with some compelling illustrations of real world applications.
According to their web site, “BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.” This one was held on the campus of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, probably soon to be a new division of NYU. Lots of interesting people came, including my hacker buddies from NYCResistor and a few intrepid presenters from Canada and even Europe.
The next version of my Designing Attraction talk should be presented ITP in a couple weeks, as a Friday lecture.
In case you hadn’t heard, we’ve made Botanicalls Twitter as a do-it-yourself example for people who like to–well–do it themselves. It’s the first step in making Botanicalls available to a wider audience, and the online press has taken note. In the last 48 hours, we’ve been graced by the attention of:
Make Magazine
CNet
Slashdot
Lifehacker
Gizmodo
Wired
…and even Business Week
Botanicalls Twitter would not have happened without both brilliant code and sage advice from Limor Fried. We also appreciate the support of Phil Torrone who inspired our Twitter venture and helped to make it a success. Botanicalls is a project from Kate Hartman, Kati London, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi.
Why is this man smiling? It’s because our XBee API Library for Processing now can handle multiple I/O samples in each data frame. This is a big help for projects getting high frequency data, like accelerometer information, where the sample rate needs to be very frequent. For example, if you want to take samples every 10 ms, but only need to deliver them every 500 ms, this is the code you’ve been awaiting. And that is precisely why Dan Shiffman is smiling.
Next up is receiving regular data, and then probably AT commands.
The Eye-Fi card is a memory card for cameras that wirelessly uploads photos to your home computer or to online services like Flickr. It connects automatically to a pre-selected Wi-Fi network, then interactively transfers JPEG files in real-time. The whole thing operates out of a standard-size SD memory card, a technical feat so incredible that I was pretty sure it was a hoax until I did it myself. Works great, and it got me thinking about whether other types of files could be moved as easily.
The idea was to log environmental data using remote sensors, then have this card automatically send those data files out over Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. Here’s what I learned:
Despite these difficulties, the concept is not quite a lost cause. There’s still potential for some work-around hacks:
Whether any of this is worthwhile depends upon the application. There’s no point in doing a lot of hacking on a $100 card when a $19 XBee radio will happily transfer data using less power, and with the excellent customer and engineering support provided by Digi. However there are certain situations, for example a mobile environmental sensor with transient access to Wi-Fi, where the combination of storage and session management would make hacking an Eye-Fi worthwhile. If you happen to try out any of these potential hacks, please let me know and I’ll share the results.
Dan Shiffman and I are continuing development on our Processing library for Digi’s XBee radios. The 1.1 library now facilitates receiving single sample I/O packets in API mode from both the Series 1 and ZNet radios (formerly known as Series 2), and returns an object that contains the analog values, digital values, sender’s address. Please let me know if you are using this library. Your feedback will helps us make it better.
You can download version 1.1 from the main XBee API Library for Processing page.
We use a lot of batteries at ITP. Most of these end their life as industrial waste in our “Techo-scrap” bin, eventually to be carted off by an NYU contractor to parts unknown where their chemicals perhaps leach into places unthinkable? Maybe, not. Hopefully they’re treated with great care, but it certainly would be far more environmentally sound for us to be reusing our batteries instead of handing industrial waste off as somebody else’s problem.
Therefore to get things greener, I set up a brand-new battery recharging station to be shared by all of our students and faculty. We can charge commonly available Nickel-metal Hydride (NiMH) AAA, AA, C, D and 9 Volt cells. There’s also a small Lithium-ion coin cell charger, for special 3.6 Volt rechargeable coin cells. To help answer technical questions, a manual for each charger has been laminated and attached to the recharging station.
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