On Thursday Kate Hartman took me to visit her Social Body lab at OCAD University. After that, we went to visit Lawrence at Creatron, a local retailer of electronics parts for hobbyists. I am envious of the electronics hackers in Toronto because of that store! Lawrence carries all the stuff I and my students buy online all the time: microcontrollers, modules from online retailers like Adafruit and Spark Fun and individual components like resistors, LEDs, and much more. He told me he works directly with his friends and colleagues in Hong Kong to import parts directly, so as to cut out the middleman and keep prices low. I tried to talk him into opening a store in New York City as well. We need you in NYC, Lawrence!
The Digifest talk was a great experience, thanks to organizers Luigi Ferrara, Nick Crampton, Samantha Fraser and the rest of the Digifest TO team. Thanks also to Maria Grazia Mattei and Giulia Capodieci of Meet the Media Guru for inviting and hosting me as well.Thanks to all the folks in the audience who asked really great questions as well.
On Friday Steve, John, and Ramona Pringle gave me a tour of Ryerson’s Digital Media facilities. Ryerson’s just finishing off the renovation of their Image Arts gallery, which looks like it’ll be a good space for showcasing student and faculty work. The building has a skin of LED panels, all of which are software-controllable, and John and his colleagues have been writing driver software for it. I look forward to seeing images from it when it’s lit up, and seeing what students do with it when they get their hands on it. We also took a tour of Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone business incubator, and had a great chat with Jason Nolan about the work EDGElab is doing in assistive design. He showed me an Arduino-based keyboard emulator designed by Vlad Cazan that was built to help a young girl with 1P36 deletion syndrome to communicate.
Keyboard emulator by Vlad Cazan and EDGELab
The TIFF Nexus peripherals event featured five hardware and software game hacks developed by teams who signed up for the event. Sadly, I only got to play two of them before I had to leave. Button Masher (again featuring Vlad and Alex Bethke of Golden Gear Games) is made up of two panels of hexagons of large light-up buttons, a sort of 21st century wack-a-mole, but with a variety of different games you can play on it, from snake trap to an Othello-like board game. Analog Defender, by Alexander Martin and Patrick Dinnen is a space game in the style of Space Invaders, but with a control panel made of great chunky industrial control knobs and buttons. The interface is pretty complicated but unlabled, and the developers encouraged players to label the controls with post-it notes as a form of social labeling. I loved the way you end up collaborating with people who played before you as a result.
It was a great trip, and it was wonderful to see so many folks using Arduino in really creative ways in Toronto.
New fellows in the TinkerKit! family: [T000060] and [T000062] are two versions of the same gyroscope module (1x / 4x sensitivity) based on the LPR5150AL from ST Microelectronics. We are sharing example codes and a visual UI in Processing (hosted on Scuola)
Kenbak computer (claimed to be one of the first personal computer – 1971) has come back from the shadows of the past.
I’d been thinking for a while that emulating an old-school switches-and-lamps computer would be a fun Arduino project, but had stalled looking at things like the Altair 8800 with its 30+ lights and 20+ switches. However, when I stumbled upon the Kenbak I thought it was something I could pull off as my first real Arduino project. Naturally I called it the KENBAK-uino. This is the end-product, it can be programmed via the buttons on the front panel and show outputs on the LEDs. It’s a faithful emulation of the original CPU but with a few enhancements thrown in like pre-loaded sample programs and access to a real time clock.
Massimo interverrà all‘Arduino Day organizzato all’interno di Robotica 2011. Oltre alle presentazioni di Davide Canepa [Scuola di Robotica] e Leonardo di Cosmo [Discienza] vari utenti Arduino (scuole e singoli) avranno la possibilità di mostrare / presentare il loro progetto [Programma]. (scrivi a info (chiocciola) scuoladirobotica.it partecipare allo show-case). Arduino parteciperà attivamente a questa edizione di Robotica 2011 con uno stand. Veniteci a trovare per avere maggiori informazioni su Arduino e la didattica, sperimentare con vari progetti in esposizione e partecipare alle attività organizzate durante la fiera.
Maker Faire New York is over and we are seeing a lot of reports and reviews about the new products Arduino has announced, we’re sincerely impressed by the amount of positive feedback and offers of collaboration that we have received.
We are releasing a two part video extract of my speech on saturday at Maker Faire New York. The title of the speech is “what’s ahead for Arduino” and it describes the new products we’ve already announced on friday.
Yesterday we’ve had the pleasure of being slashdotted for the first time in our history with the side effect of being mentioned on a lot of websites. In particular what caught my attention is this article by Steve Rosenboaum on the Huffington Post entitled “What Barack Obama Could Learn From Maker Faire” :
Arduino is the kind of innovation eco-system that The White House could support today. Much like the President’s Fitness Challenge drove health and set goals for the nation, it’s easy to imagine an Arduino White House Challenge that would give young people the goals and rewards to drive big ideas into the economy. Today Dean Kamen’s US First Robotics teams are doing that in high schools across the country. And yet President Obama stays almost entirely silent on technology as if somehow the future of America is about us embracing and revitalizing the past.
Education and Community have always been at the core of Arduino….
Another big deal was the announcement that Radio Shack is going to be stocking Arduino in its thousands of stores. Everybody I met was tremendously excited about this (like we have been throughout the negotiation) and a momentous event for an open source project.
We closed our presentation with “Arduino is You”, this is something we like to remind everybody because the community is the lifeblood of Arduino. Give yourself a round of applause like we did in New York.
Yesterday we had a wonderful day at New York Hall of Science, for the Open Source Hardware Summit, in its second edition. We had the chance to see amazing presentations from makers all over the worlds [see schedule & list of participants] We had a good time in taking with Alicia Gibb, one of the organizers who explained us this year’s numbers and some ideas for the future.
Artist and educator Jody Culkin has written and illustrated a great new introduction to Arduino comic. It covers the basic concepts to get you started in clear graphic form, a nice intro for students who like their learning in visual form. Thanks to Jody for the link.
David Schneider from [IEEEspectrum] tells and shares his DIY Remotely Operated Vehicle undersea, based on two Arduinos
Last year at about this time, crews in the Gulf of Mexico were working feverishly to bring BP’s blown-out oil well under control. Some of the more spectacular parts of that effort, as you may recall, involved the use of remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. Perhaps you had the same thought as I did—that it would be cool to build one.
A beautiful project by [Leigh Davis]. It is a brilliant proof of how Arduino fits into virtually any sphere of thought and is the shortest path for a creator realizing his idea in reality.
He writes:
I began the first few days by developing a stand alone application build in MaxMSP that understands the notes that a play on my (recently purchased second-hand) flute. I set the range from low C right up to the 3rd octave D. Each note of the chromatic scale triggers a bang, which is coloured uniquely to the other notes bang messages.
The bang message then sets the corresponding color to the display screen on the application. Which will in turn send a signal to the arduino to dispense the corresponding oil color on water according to the different notes. (Something like a physical Milkdrop!)He further plans to control different LEDs, motors and the likes using the Rayne application.
We are happy to announce 3 new products available at the Arduino Store: two powerful servos with the standard Tinkerkit 3pin connector (T010050 and T010051) and OpenSoftwear, a book about fashion and technology by Tony Olsson, David Gaetano, Jonas Odhner, Samson Wiklund, in it’s second, revised edition.
Arduino counts with two twitter accounts: @arduinoteam is the one used by the team to report about things we think matter to the community. @arduinoblog is twitting for every blog post, and allows us handling answers on our blog.
