Tinker it now!

It’s that time of the year again…

American geeks will flee to the desert to enjoy a cocktail of drugs, desert landscape and pyrotechnics while out here on the other side of the ocean, well there’s DorkCamp and the Ars Electronics Festival.

A quick scan of the activities at Dorkbot and you might be able to enjoy a card game of Mahjong, see giant bubbles being made, and hack on some Pure Data. All fun!

I thought I might be able to go but I can’t :( so take pictures for me people!

Last night’s H3 Social was a total blast! If you weren’t there, check out the pics in the sidebar! We had loads of good people show up like Peter Knight, who’s responsible for flash mobs in London. Rob McKinnon impressed everyone in the pub with his brainwave machine he built from an article in Make magazine and Benjamin got everyone drooling with his iPhone.

In light of the many great discussions we had I started a Yahoo Groups page for anyone interested in these informal meetups, something we’re looking to be able to repeat every month. Watch out for the next one!

Crowdspirit is in beta now. This french start-up allows you to post ideas about cool electronic products you’d like to see on the market, vote or even invest money in the idea, test and recommend products to the retailers and finally, based on your contribution you might even get a share of the products revenue. Interesting, let’s see how they do.

Fritzing, an open-source initiative to support designers and artists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product, is having a kick-off workshop in Potsdam and Massimo will be attending with most of the Arduino crew as well. Do apply!

Slightly older, last year at Euroscon, Simon Wardley of Fotango talked about the web of making things and the software implications of fabbing. The presentation file can be downloaded.

Schultze & Webb a design consultancy in London are working on a social digital radio for the BBC.

” * Radios can look better than the regular ‘kitchen radio’ devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we’re using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step.
* This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social ‘now listening’ site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme.
* If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.”

Tinker.it! has been busy this summer, collaborating with our friend Ubi de Feo we worked on the technology for Scottie, a project initiated by the Waag Society in Amsterdam.

“In the first place, within the project Scottie, prototypes are being developed for children aged between 13-15, that are hospitalized for a longer period. Contacts with children in hospital are now mainly fysical, planned visits with explicit communication. But how to maintain, next to their new role of ‘being in hospital’, their existing roles as class mate, brother or son? How to personalize communication in an affectionate way, while being distant?”

Check it out!

The Arduino team has started an Arduino specific blog with infos on new additions to the Arduino hardware and software family… check it out!

Responsive environments are a big technological challenge as prototyping takes on huge scales and the number of users is hard to evaluate. Everything has to be “dummy-proof” and work perfectly, or look like it does at least :) Risk is sometimes very high but the rewards are often worth it.

Last month, at the first H3 event, we heard from Moritz Waldemeyer about prototyping for the catwalk. The video dress he developed for Hussein Chalayan was made of a few thousands chips all powered with a battery whose life lasted 2 minutes, exactly the time it took the model to go up and down the catwalk…

For the Building Interactive Playgrounds project, Alex Beim from Canada designed an interactive ball, filled with helium that when pushed away by a crowd changes color. In this case, I’m sure making the electronics as unaccessible as possible within the helium ball was a priority to make this work no matter what. It makes for a cool concert or party massive-offline-player-interaction. :)

Zygote Interactive Ball at BIP, Italy from alexbeim and Vimeo.

As we’re always interested in getting everyone to dabble in electronics, I thought this sounded like the perfect thing.

Essential electronics for Software folks by Caleb Tennis is an introduction to the world of electronics.

” A lot of people are into Making their own technology these days, from 3D printers to home-made robots, Digital Video Records (DVRs), Media Centers, and more. But it you’re a computer programmer you might not know the ins and outs of the hardware side of these projects.

Caleb Tennis explains it all. From a quick look at basic physics (including fun with magnets) to electronic circuits, power supplies, and networking, you’ll see how it all works–and how to make it work for you. ”

The pdf will soon be online so keep an eye out for it.

If you’re in Amsterdam in September, make sure to try to sign up to the Physical Computing Hacker’s Camp organised by our friends at Mediamatic for Picnic, the infamous cross-media week. You’ll get to hack for about 5 days with the best of them and a large crowd as guinea pigs :)

It’s August and London is slow, Italy is shutting down for 3 weeks and Amsterdam is well.. rainy. So what more fun than a pub meetup!

If you’re in London and want to meet other hardware hackers, do show up to the Nanobyte bar in Soho on Wed 29th of August, from 7pm onwards…

Check out who’s attending as time goes by on the upcoming page.