I use quick prototyping tools quite often and my definition of prototyping is quite broad. Usually I start with paper sketches, as they are cheap, quick, and easy (There are a number of other good reasons for paper and pencil sketching, see Bill Buxton or my dissertation.) For paper and pencil works well for both hardware and software prototyping, but there are some other useful tools out there. If I’m prototyping in hardware, I usually use Arduino (over, mBed, PIC, etc). For software, and screen-based work, the list of useful tools keeps growing.
On the LDSE project, I used Omnigraffle to produce the wireframes for the user interface, which were very useful as paper prototyping and user feedback, before we coded in Java and JavaFX. For moving to a higher fidelity and for wireframes, there are a couple of handy web-based tools out there, which allow you to model interactions as well – also without cutting new code. This has the benefit of testing interactions where the transition is hard to model easily in paper (e.g., zooming, dynamic representations, etc.). I’ve tried Mockingbird, which is very good for quick and dirty mockups, and which uses a “sketchy” look for UI elements. This is great for making sure stakeholders don’t get hung up on trivial things like button colours, etc. JustInMind moves up the fidelity scale a bit, with benefits and drawbacks. Both have free-use modes for quickly sketching up something and sharing it, but for any serious work, you’d need to pay a nominal amount for the services to be useful – for example, sharing with clients. I’ll be trying out both of these further for an upcoming iPhone app I’m working on with the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. I expect the trend in web-based tools will continue to grow until a couple of players win out.
I like London’s new Cycle Hire scheme (Boris Bikes) but don’t always want to hunt down the Barclay’s website to find out how many (if any) bicycles are available at the docking station near my office. So, I’ve been working on a little project to make a physical bar graph to illustrate the current situation. At a glance, I’ll be able to see if I can use a bike to grab some lunch. An Arduino+a harvested printer head transport mechanism will do, I think.
You have to apply to TFL to get a feed from them and I didn’t want to bother. I figured I’d use CURL to screenscrape it. However, using curl with no parameters returned a page-not-available result from the page which displays the map content using Javascript. Crunch! Not very helpful. It turns out you need to specify a user-agent to get a valid result from the cycle hire site, which returns the expected page nicely:
curl -A “Mozilla/4.0″ https://web.barclayscyclehire.tfl.gov.uk/maps
After fiddling about parsing this I got the data for the terminal I am interested in. However, I also poked around and found this very nice API, which allows me to simply sent an HTTP request for the the relevant information in XML, JSON, CSV or YAML, formats. Very handy indeed, and updated every minute! Now I’ll be spinning along with my project pretty quickly, I think…
Just finished a really pleasant seminar yesterday at the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the Univeristy of Nottingham. “TEL” in the title refers to Technology enhanced learning. I’ve been trying to unpick the connections between making and hacking and TEL for a while now and appreciate any comments of suggestions in this area.
There’s streaming video on their site and here are the slides:
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…
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!
Wow. It had to happen, of course. Shapeways have developed 3D printing in a material other than resin or polymer, the traditional materials for rapid prototyping physical objects. They can do it in stainless steel! The magic isn’t toooo surprising though, as they use the same techniques. Stainless steel dust is fused into a solid form layer by layer. The finished model is then bronze filled and baked. The piece comes out with a matte finish but can then be tumbled for a polished finish. They appear to be targeting the maker/craft community and I can think of a lot of fiddly parts that I’d need to make. But it’s still not as good as the 3D printer that the clever guys at EvilMadScientist Labs (rock on, guys!!) homebrewed, which makes 3D models in cane sugar!
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I use quick prototyping tools quite often and my definition of prototyping is quite broad. Usually I start with paper sketches, as they are cheap, quick, and easy (There are a number of other good reasons for paper and pencil sketching, see Bill Buxton or my dissertation.) For paper and pencil works well for both hardware and software prototyping, but there are some other useful tools out there. If I’m prototyping in hardware, I usually use Arduino (over, mBed, PIC, etc). For software, and screen-based work, the list of useful tools keeps growing.
Themocracy