Recently, as part of an iPhone development project I’ve been working on with the Institute of Zoology and Birkbeck, I had a need for an audio line in adapter so that we’d be able to record stereo audio from an audio sensor. The application tags audio data with GPS information as part of a citizen-scientist data collection project.

Strangely (or perhaps I didn’t dig around the interweb long enough) I didn’t find many resources for a home-brew line-in adapter and the ones I found were pretty vague and hard to follow. So Peter and I put our heads together and rolled our own. It’s a fairly straightforward circuit, but has a little twist, because the iPhone OS is smart enough to detect what’s plugged into the stereo jack. (The diagram above is a lot more clear than anything I found.) This particular project only required a left channel audio input to the monaural iPhone mic, but if you wanted to route both left and right channels to the mic, that’s represented by the dashed line.

The resistor+capacitor network provides a pull-up that the iPhone is looking for to detect whether you’ve got a standard stereo headset plugged in or whether you’ve got a microphone (i.e., iPhone) headset and can take a phone call with it. This particular circuit is tuned for the audio sensor we’ve been using, but is about the right spec for most audio recording purposes and works fine with the audio recording app that ships with the iPhone. The parts cost about £3 and I whipped one up in about 10 minutes!

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.

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…

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.

At the very least, if this technology catches on it will truly change the kinds of online social interactions that are possible and will make significant challenges to both current social networking stalwarts (Facebook, etc.) and the old standby desktop applications. I can see particular benefits for collaborative document editing, technology enhanced education, an dare I say it: Physical computing.

Since Wave uses an open protocol standard, anyone can develop for it. I’m envisioning online collaborative conversations actuating physical devices and real world sensors updating Waves. The possibilities are exciting!