Just finished presenting the ZigBee Internet Gateway at Sketching in Hardware 2010, held at the Encounter dome at LAX airport. My presentation covered the basics of (essentially) bringing web services to the Arduino via a ConnectPort and XBee radios from Digi International. The Gateway is intended for use in schools, design firms, hacker spaces or art venues. Some engineers from Sparkfun wanted to know if this was something I’m selling. Nope, it’s all going to be free.
Adafruit is selling the new Botanicalls Kits, and there’s a lovely post from Lady Ada herself about the update. We’re thrilled to have such staunch supporters and to be in the mix with so many other groovy kits.
So please, switch that TV off. It’s time to tune in to your potted pals with a brand-new Botanicalls Kit from Adafruit.
Recently created a page in the projects area where I can post simple Arduino functions that I frequently reuse. There’s my standby for blinking a light along with code for buzzing a buzzer, smoothing some output over time, having an LED blink out a version number and a modification of the map() function that handles larger positive numbers. These should be handy for students who are starting to clean up their code with functions, or anyone avoiding wheel reinvention.
I gave a talk on Sociable Objects yesterday at Microsoft’s Social Computing Symposium. to show all the great work around socially active physical computing at ITP. There was a live feed of the conference on O’Reilly Radar, but of course that’s done now so we’ll have to wait for Microsoft Research to publish talks. In the meantime, a few people asked for my materials so here are the slides to my presentation. It was great to rub elbows with so many interesting and influential collegues. Thanks to Tom Coates for asking me to speak, and to Microsoft’s Lili Cheng and RIT’s Liz Lawley for inviting me!
Update: The talk was posted by Chris Pirillo.
The EAGLE Layout Editor is a great way to design custom printed circuit boards for Arduino-based electronics projects. However, while Arduino uses the ATMEGA168 and ATMEGA8 microcontrollers from Atmel, the EAGLE libraries I’ve found online don’t use Arduino’s simplified pin labeling.
Therefore, I’ve created a custom Arduino-AVR library for EAGLE with the proper Arduino pin indicators to make it easier to create custom boards like the ones we use for the new Botanicalls Kits and several other projects I’m working on that are not yet public. Download the new Arduino-AVR library here.
The final day of 5 in 5 was happy-dirty, telepathic, deliciously chilly, retro-reflective, recursively meta, southwardly mobile, ephemerally illustrated, dubiously conversant, cartographically challenging, mixed, mashed and lovingly recycled.
Andrew Schneider was our final Guest Star and meta-chronicled the waning day of five. As promised, the fivers headed to Odessa where their personal bartender concocted the 5-in-5-Dead-or-Alive cocktail. The ingredients are a poorly guarded secret, but suffice it to say that there’s five kinds of booze and (true story) five of the fivers had five of them each. Outside of the hangover, the week was a great success–creative, interactive, productive and prolific. In five days they completed over 60 projects. Check out the blog for details or read all my posts for a summary.
Working on a prototype for a future version of the Botanicalls Kit, we’ve started toying with a leafy motif….
The first prototype of the XBee LilyPad open-source wearable radio has arrived and is working properly. All the lights turn on, the connections are just great and getting a proto in hand has spawned all kinds of new ideas. The push for the next version is to move all the components out from under the XBee so that it can sit flush to the board, making the LilyPad thinner if it is soldered directly on. We’re also going to add a voltage regulator so the board can be used with a 5 Volt supply if desired. Headers for programming the XBee and a single jumper to control the debugging LEDs will add useful flexibility. Thanks to Tom Igoe and Zach Eveland for their helpful suggestions.
The prototype with female headers:
Zach performs a wearability test with the help of scotch tape:
7 in 7 is now a fond memory, so the participants got together and did a little post-mortem evaluation on the scheme. The week was clearly an overall success. Everyone felt that 7 in 7 got their creative juices moving and provided motivation to attack projects that in some cases had sat on the to-do list for months or even years. Things got done.
Even so, there’s room for improvement. The universal feeling was that seven days is an unwieldy length of time. It was impractical to put everything else in our lives on hold for that long. Five days, or as little as three would be much easier to manage, and improve our ability to focus on the creative tasks at hand. A shorter timeframe would also create a more cohesive group, so that everyone could attend kick-off meetings, sanity breaks and a celebratory completion party. Managing the pressure to produce came up several times. Several people commented that while the social motivation was excellent, they sometimes felt intimidated by the visibility. Keeping things inspirational and stimulating while maintaining a supportive and informal environment is clearly the balance to strike for success.
Other advice was to avoid embarking on a big project or doing too many things you didn’t know how to do already. Reserving some minimal time each day for attending to other tasks, remembering that documentation can take a significant chunk of time at the end and making sure that you’re comfortable making the project public were all suggested.
Some great ideas came out of our wrap-up meeting including:
We’ll definitely keep these ideas in mind for next time, which might be a 3 in 3 sometime in August or September. In the meantime, several of the one-day projects have inspired interesting larger ventures. I’m personally excited about trying this all again, with fresh new faces added to the mix.
7 in 7 is bold scheme to do seven creative projects in seven days. The Resident Researchers at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program are pioneering this venture beginning June 8th, 2008. The mandate is as follows:
A preview of project ideas include Physical Flight Tracker, Door Twitter Sign, Salad Dress, Robot Phone, Window Ghosts and an album about a dangerous water park. Documentation will be aggregated on the 7 in 7 blog.
Faludi on the Blogs… Botanicalls on the Blogs