The interactive modular physical computing kits are coming fast and thick these days! Now, in addition to relative newcomers such as Sifteo and LittleBits, along with more familiar kits such as the Bug System, Phidgets, and classics such as LEGO Mindstorms, there’s a new kid in town: Cubelets from Modular Robotics. Unlike other modular cube-shaped pluggables, cubelets don’t come with a screen. And they are very physical, which is not surprising for a project which spun off from Carnegie Mellon.
“Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.”
The collection of magnetic modular units are made up of three categories of blocks, which represent the three basic elements of physical computing: sensing, “thinking”, and actuating. They join with magnets and, no doubt, a satisfying “click”. Snap them together in a valid configuration and away they go (check out the video with the quirky-accented presenter). Judging by the photograph featuring kids using them, they will be targeted at young learners too. It will be interesting to see if the learning activities created for them will be as thoroughly considered as the engineering for the cubelets themselves.
As usual with hot-off-the-press tech, these are only available for pre-order for $160.00, but I think I’ll get in queue now.
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!
At the Art.on.Wires Festival in May I talked about three recent projects: spacehoppers, my visualization of the Londons bicycle hire system, and NetChimes. I discussed some of the technical details about how these projects were realised and reflected upon the process of building those interactions. I aso demoed the NetChimes audio feed with participants in the audience tuning in, during the talk. Art.on.Wires had a really good feel this year, very cozy, with lots of people learning, hacking, chatting and making things happen. There were several live performances involving collaboration with off-site musicians and dancers, with live feeds streaming in from around the world. My friend Jason Geistweidt had a preview of work he has been doing in the process of creating the World Opera, involving dancers from southern California and dancers in Oslo interacting via life-size video projections and audio. Nice stuff.
Video of my talk is below, but note the title is “Connecting the Physical and the Digital” and not “Of Bits and Bikes” which I presented in London at sameAs.
This weekend, I finished up a prototype sensor for the NetChimes Projects‘s London site. It’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s a first step. The sensor responds to wind currents outside our London flat, using an Arduino to detect when the clapper strikes the sensing ring. These events are rerouted as serial information to a PureData sketch and forwarded to a Shoutcast server. You can listen to the stream by going to the NetChimes Shoutcast server for London and selecting the Listen link in the middle of the page (or click here). You will receive a “playlist” file which can be opened in iTunes, VLC or Internet Explorer (with the right plug in), allowing you to listen to the sample stream from the London site. Note, that if the wind is not blowing, you won’t hear anything, but there is a station ID announcement every 30 minutes, at the top and middle of the hour.
This sensor prototype will be the basis for the full version of the NetChimes london location, using the impressive King David Chimes (from Woodstock Chimes). For now, you can listen in to the live stream or go to the NetChime Project site and listen to the other streams from Tromso North, Tromso South, or Bournemouth. We’ll be bringing on other streams from Oslo at Art.on.Wires, next week.
I’ve been collecting a good deal of data about the Barclays cycle hire bikes using a great little API, which has taken a lot of the pain out of screen scraping the Boris Bikes website. I’ve got several Mb of data now and have got to where I can start to do plots over time. Mapping coloured circles to the number of bikes available has given me a nice little visualisation of the distribution of bikes over the course of the day. I’ll be talking about the project at sameAs on 28 March. And of course, I’ll be continuing work on the ambient display.
It turns out that some of the people over at CASA-UCL, my alma mater, have also been working on this problem (there’s nothing new under the sun!), using historical data obtained from the cycle hire scheme – as recently demoed at Dokbot London.
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The interactive modular physical computing kits are coming fast and thick these days! Now, in addition to relative newcomers such as Sifteo and LittleBits, along with more familiar kits such as the Bug System, Phidgets, and classics such as LEGO Mindstorms, there’s a new kid in town: Cubelets from Modular Robotics. Unlike other modular cube-shaped pluggables, cubelets don’t come with a screen. And they are very physical, which is not surprising for a project which spun off from Carnegie Mellon.
Themocracy