We have liftoff. My first Balloon Environmental Sensing test successfully “slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings” sending data back the whole time. First flight was at the Digital Naturalism Conference in Gamboa, Panama, featuring 10+ sensor values streaming from the balloon to an online data collection system and dashboard. It was a big success! …

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Rust is gorgeous. We marvel at its endless shades of ochre, red, orange and sienna. We appreciate the organic shapes created as right angles collapse and edges decay into jagged landscapes. Rust is poetic, photogenic, artistic and melancholy. It grows on its own and famously, never sleeps. As an agricultural species, we love to garden. We plant seeds outdoors, water them …

Rust Garden Read more »

It’s easy to do environmental sensing at ground level. But how about up in the air over our heads? If we could somehow reach it inexpensively and safely, can we directly explore what lies above, perhaps making our own discoveries? One of my projects for Dinacon 2019 will create a party-balloon platform for inexpensive aerial environmental sensing. Everyday balloons offer a …

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Spent much of June on a jungle island in Thailand, attending a biology-art-hackathon-“un-conference” to build electronics projects that interact with nature. The first-ever Digital Naturalism Conference on Koh Lon island ran for six weeks of arty, ant-licking, bio-mimicking, data logging, fruit roasting, butane soldering fun that pushed my limits and reminded me how outstanding and wildly creative the maker community can …

Island in Thailand – Digital Naturalism Conference Read more »

XBee radios have rocketed into space! Early in the morning on July 7, NASA launched a NASA Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket from their Wallops Flight Facility. Onboard the rocket was an experiment running the very first wireless XBee network to leave our planet. Here’s a quick description recorded on launch day: The rocket carried the SOAREX-8 Exo-Brake flight test from NASA’s Ames Research …

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Last week I presented “Constructing an Internet of Things Strategy” at Forensecure’15 near Chicago, Illinois. This talk is about how any business can develop and adopt IoT methods to remain competitive in a connected world. The conference is sponsored by  IIT’s Center for Cyber Security and Forensics Education, who were kind enough to invite me to speak. I also joined a panel discussion on “The Internet …

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For the latest Digi Hackathon, I headed overseas to hold our first ever creative construction event at Digi’s office in Logroño, Spain. Using XBee WiFi Cloud Kits, the four teams hacked away for what was the most competitive session yet. In a matter of hours, each team had to quickly brainstorm, build, and present their cloud-connected projects. Their results were terrific. Projects …

Digi Employee Hackathon: XBee Wi-Fi Visits Logroño Read more »

World Maker Faire NY is less than a week away! We’ll have project demos for you to check out, a new development kit, and we’ll be giving a talk on connecting your projects to the Internet. It’s going to be an extremely fun weekend. If you’re going to Maker Faire, be sure to stop by the Digi booth where we will be …

World Maker Faire NY 2013: Make Your Project Awesome Read more »

Travis Good just wrote a nice MAKE post on my “Liking the Guest” talk from Make Media’s Hardware Innovation Workshop last month. In it I make the point that caring about the people who use your product is a basic interaction design principle, in the same way that white space and alignment are principles for graphic design. In our everyday lives, when …

Liking the Guest on Make Read more »