I’m pleased to see a new product over at ThinkGeek, who are now offering the LittleBits Kits for electronics prototyping and learning. The kit has various sensors surface mounted with standardised connectors, which snap together magnetically. They are positioned for 7-13 year olds as well as hobbyists and newbies to electronics.
It’s clear that their ease of use greatly hides the detail of what’s going on electronically. For beginning learners this is good, as you can get straight to the payoff – I put a few bits together and wow!, I can build a touch-activated LED. This allows for easy trial-and-error testing, asking questions, exploring possibilities. And it can spawn further inquiry into what is actually going on electronically. It is one level of abstraction higher from, say, an Arduino, which would be an obvious choice for people who would like to take their learning a LittleBit further (sorry, couldn’t resist…not in my capacity…oof!). Incidentally, we created a similar kit with the Arduino team, at TinkerLondon, without magnetic connectors, though. The pricepoint is a little high for all but the most enthusiastic geekdads and will likely price LittleBits out of many school budgets. However, for those who are able to splurge, it makes a welcome addition to the toolset for learning.
For Design prototyping, LittleBits’ main limitation will be that the mounting of the components on boards limits how these pieces can be placed into a physical housing, and in fact, the main idea is to support learning and experimentation, rather than testing out interactivity. However, I can see a compelling case for adding this to the Design Studio trolley of raw materials for exploration and design ideation. I’ll be even more excited to locate a UK distributor!
Farnell have a pretty nifty new enclosure for Arduinos. It’s a specially-designed, black ABS plastic housing that’s injection moulded and contains bosses to hold the Arduino in place. The location of the bosses means that you can either leave the enclosure “as is” for mounting a standard Arduino or if you wish to secure one of the Arduino Megas, you can to remove a boss with a pair of side cutters or a blade. Or you could simply snap it off.
An Arduino Uno/Mega fits perfectly inside, with extra room for a 9V battery and there’s a little inspection door as well. At first glance, I thought the door would facilitate replacing the battery, but it’s more suited to being able to access the reset switch on either a standard- or a mega- size Arduino. Add to this, the box is large enough to also contain a shield, and best of all, there is a knock-out plate that can accommodate an ethernet shield, too. The bulge this creates on the top of the box is slightly inconvenient, and the housing will not lay flat on that side, but this is a minor issue. The obverse has a sligtly recessed face which could accommodate a decorative label or of course, the necessary radioactive/hazmat warning.
At about £9.00 plus shipping, the price is slightly on the high-side. But considering that it is perfectly suited for its job, and you don’t need to muck about with drilling even a single hole simply to house an Arduino project (as you would with a generic enclosure), it’s pretty much worth the cost. Shoot on over to Farnell to pick one up one of these little guys.
Note: the photo on the website makes it appear to be a semi-transparent enclosure, but this is simply to show that the enclosure can also accommodate an Arduino shield. The housing is solid, opaque black.
I’m very pleased to see the video produced from the amazing delegates and attendees hacking and working at Art.on.Wires 2011 (in Oslo back in May). I made a little cameo appearance teaching an Arduino Workshop!
I’ve been working on the physical side of my ambient display for a Barclay’s Cycle Scheme docking station on Theobald’s road – one that I use pretty often. The challenge for this display is that it uses a motor and drive assembly harvested from an obsolete HP printer. Properly, anything requiring precise positioning should use a stepper motor, but that’s not what I found inside the printer. It uses a simple cheapie induction motor. So, I’m considering it a design challenge/constraint.
There was a plastic optical calibration strip somewhere in the assembly but that’s long gone. So precise positioning will be rudimentary, as the vagaries of induction drive do not always yield reliable results. My tradeoff for the display is to zero-out the motor for every display cycle instead of skipping directly from one number to the next. Each number will have its own drive time and the motor supply is regulated to keep it as constant as possible to minimise the likelihood that the motor will be slower or faster depending on supply voltage.
This test is just to make sure the drive times for digits and the serial communication are all working properly. Next steps are connecting it to the web API and making it look pretty!
Sometimes, the ideal little package comes along and you don’t have to do all the hard work fabricating a physical user interace. While working on the Spot-On project at LKL, I found a very nify little “finger torch” that solves the problem of powering up an LED in a small form factor. This little guy’s is perfect for retrofitting with an LD271 infrared emitter, for Wiimote hacking, IR Motion tracking, and generally mucking about moving around infrared sources, for you Johnny Lee fans. This package combines 3 button cells, a switch and an LED into a tight little case with a hook-and-loop strap. Not sure if it’s emitting continuously or in pulses (PWM) but there’s a microcontroller under that resin blob (pic 2), so it seems likely. A little de/re-soldering and, you’ve got yourself a perfect finger-mounted IR pointer!
Last week at Tinker.it!, we installed the “Centograph” at St. Paul’s School for Boys (London). This project is a real-life histogram, that moves its bars according to data values retrieved from Google. When you enter a search term into the computer, Centograph queries the Google News Archive for a list of related news articles over the past 100 years. The archive returns a timeline of articles sorted according to date. The bars on the graph then change height to display a histogram of the relative number of news articles for each decade. Details and video are on the Tinker.it! website.
A quick note on books that we recommend during our Arduino Beginner’s Workshops:
Artificial Reality, Myron Krueger
Code, Charles Peltzold
Design and the Elastic Mind, Paola Antonelli
Designing the User Experience, Bill Buxton
Information Arts, Stephen Wilson
Making Things Talk, Tom Igoe
Physical Computing, Dan O’Sullivan & Tom Igoe
Processing, Casey Reas & Ben Fry
Processing,Ira Greenberg
Vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg
Visualizing Data, Ben Fry
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