I’m still marvelling at what you can do with SmartSockets, a 14 segment display driver for multi-segment display tubes like ZM1350s and in particular, B7971 grand-daddies. Enthusiasts such as John Taylor have created some really nice transition animations to demonstrate what you can do to add visual interest to clocks and other alphanumeric displays, like the four-letter word display. There’s also a SmartSockets group on Yahoo, which is an offshoot of the more popular NeoNixie group of which I’ve been a member (lurker) for years. Traffic on SmartSockets is relatively low…for now.
Well, it’s 2010 and what a harsh decade it has been! To ring in the New Year on a positive note, I harvested an old edge-lit display mechanism from my stores and lit it up with a few LEDs and an Arduino. I used a simple pulse-width modulation (PWM) routine to do the fading. It’s not terribly exciting, but you can watch the video…
Spacehopper Demo
I’ve been working with my colleagues on a project for SonyEricsson around the release of their latest mobile phones series (Satio and Aino). The project involves using twitter to inflate a warehouse full of spacehoppers on a live webcam. The hoppers will be “released in the wild” as part of the product launch, and tweeters can suggest what their fate should be. The whole system uses an Arduino-controlled solenoid array which takes its input from a Ruby script which is listening to the twitter streaming API. Tweets sent via the API are used to randomly inflate one of the 49 hoppers on the array. The hoppers, username and the tweet message are displayed via a live feed. Sony Ericsson have posted the “making-of” video on YouTube, and I found myself simplifying the technical details, yet again…
Just read Danah Boyd’s excellent blog post on the twitter “backchannel” phenomenon and the difficulty it presents for speakers who are placed in a very awkward position. Her extremely negative experience at Web2.0 Expo illustrates how difficult it is for public speakers to cope with live (and often unmoderated) twitterstreams onstage behind them. The shift in the structure of this social discourse does not offer anything of significant benefit for either the speaker or the audience. Danah’s experience captures it better than I can and for the full scoop, head on over to her blog and read about it. I, for one, certainly hope this is not the future of public speaking. And I’m no luddite!
The British Computer Society’s Annual conference on Human-Computer Interaction was held in Cambridge last week and I popped round to present a paper on using sketching as a design technique to improve collaborative design activity, enhance creativity, and generally help the design process. This is an approach we foster at Tinker.it! and we try to actively engage with our clients in this kind of collaborative idea generation.
Highlights of the conference were the Keynote addresses and a few interesting papers on tangible interaction (though these were old news by now). In the opening Keynote, Prof Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art presented several interactive student projects and generally perplexed the audience, many of whom are not used to thinking about interaction design from a designer’s perspective - a couple of the audience questions could be summed up as “What’s the point?” The Formal Methods (see wikipedia) guys had a field day.
UI demigod Bill Buxton presented a stimulating closing keynote which showed examples of user interfaces from days gone by, like a touchscreen interactive mobile phone from 1991(!) - no web access though, since that was BEFORE THE INTERNET. Remember that?? He suggested that we can get a lot of great interaction design ideas and bootstrap design by looking at what’s gone before. And he made a good case for studying your interaction design history books - yeah, they don’t exist. In fact, at Tinker.it! we’re currently working on a really cool retro-80’s project with some pretty novel and old user interfaces. The results will be at the BFI this weekend, so stay tuned.
Electronics | admin | February 1, 2010 | 
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