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