Presented “Fun with XBees” at Maker Faire New York yesterday, including work by Jen Lewin, Eric Beug, Limor Fried, Elly Bowness and the Rockwell Group. The talk, which is becoming one of my standards, shows the cool things people are doing with device networking and how you can join them. This is really part of […]

The latest version of the XBee Internet Gateway is available today. XIG 1.3.0 includes several groundbreaking features. First there’s a new I/O Sample mode. Starting today, an XBee radio can squirt sensor information directly into the cloud  with no external microcontroller or special configuration needed. There’s also a push feature that feeds serial information down to

The next two weeks are going to be lively ones for makers in New York City! Here’s where to find me: We’re also launching my Sensitive Buildings class at ITP today plus somebody asked me to be in an Ericsson documentary that according the producer, “aims to tell a compelling story about how we are on the

Just finished documenting the latest example project. The Light Switch XBee is a wireless wall switch that can control lamps, fans, motors or your homemade robot using Digi’s XBee radio. It’s a model for almost any digital input device you’d like to build. If it goes on and off, you can make it wireless using

This Horsie Race project, developed for my recent workshops in Colorado, creates a carnival midway-style horse race using a wireless audio input with Arduino and XBee that transmits each player’s yells and cheers to a base station radio. This base station is connected to a computer where the noise advances their horse on the screen using the Processing graphical programming environment.

I just started a terrific new job! In July, Digi International invited me to join their R&D team as Collaborative Strategy Leader. My mandate is to forge stronger connections with the maker community, discover outstanding new work, help Digi contribute to those projects and support innovation in general. Some of my cool new role will

Just launched a new talk called “Liking the Guests” at Sketching in Hardware 2011 at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. “Liking the Guests” tells the story of how holding your users in high esteem creates an unexpected and fundamental principle for good design. The talk has pirates, princesses, apes, and taxidermy, but essentially it’s about why I

We’re tremendously excited that the Botanicalls project will be featured in MoMA’s upcoming “Talk to Me” Exhibition that opens July 24th in New York on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, continuing through November 7th, 2011. Here’s the official description: Talk to Me explores the communication between people and things. The exhibition focuses on

I’m slated to teach two “Exciting XBee” classes for Sparkfun on the weekend of July 23rd. These will be hands-on workshops at Sparkfun’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Here’s the descriptions: All project materials are included, with students supplying their own computer and Arduino board. The two classes are designed to be independent. Certain basic material

ThingSpeak describes itself as “an open application platform designed to enable meaningful connections between things and people.” They just added a complete tutorial on how to use the XBee Internet Gateway to connect with their platform, including using iDigi to manage the device. So that’s two powerful platforms in one easy package! Suggested uses for