Tinker it now!

We have the great luck of having been invited to run an RFID workshop at this year’s Takeaway festival at the Dana Centre.
This event is free as well! So do sign up as places are limited!

NB: This isnt really a beginners subject and you should already know about Arduino otherwise, you might feel a bit lost.

Catching up with the web and this site is now using Feedburner. Subscribe away!

* BBC article on how video games are rated

* Gainer i/o module

Gainer is an environment for user interfaces and media installations. By using the Gainer environment, the user can handle sensors and/or actuators with a PC on various programming environments such as Flash, Max/MSP, Processing and so on.

*O2 Memory Project made by Jason Bruges Studio.

*Stifler’s Dinge installation at the P3 in Westminster.

Influenced by the 19th century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, the installation will not feature actors or musicians but will see disembodied voices, music, light, mechanical objects and extreme weather conditions mix to create a dazzling indoor landscape.

* PicoCricket kit to introduce children to electronics.

Hi! I’m John Nussey and I’m interning with Tinker it for a few weeks.

I’ll be looking at a few of the coolest projects I can find and opening them up for you.

You will have seen all the projects on youtube, filmed with a camera phone and made in people’s bedrooms, with no clue about how to make them for yourself,… well I’m going to be building them, breaking them and showing you how to, hopefully, get them working.

I’ll put a few more posts to show how they’re progressing and in a couple of weeks there should be (the beginnings of) an index of projects.

Watch this space!

Just came back from the ever glamourous Salone del Mobile and put together a little video of the interactive nuggets :) Enjoy!

Interactive work at the Milan Furniture Fair 2008 from Tinker.it on Vimeo.

++ LED reponsive bike jacket wins award.

++ Machine Collective is specialized in design and production of custom control surfaces and kits for physical computing.

++ Roomware workshop at Mediamatic on May 16th and 24th.

++ OpenSpime is a technology that enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. They provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected.

++ Ro-blocks have been doing the rounds and I like the focus on allowing children to tinker too.
“By combining sensor, logic and actuator blocks, young kids can create simple reconfigurable robots that exhibit surprisingly complex behavior.”

++ Machanical parts under soft toys is great, especially in light of our Toy hacking workshop last January. via Chris.

Seen at the corner of Old Street and Great Eastern Street in East London, this giant AEG display shows the noise level in decibels and real-time. Nifty. All for International Noise Awareness Day apparently.

Data on the web soon says the website.

If you’re hanging out at Over the air on Friday, do come by and attend Tristan Roddis’s Arduino workshop and demo of the Bluetooth Arduino.

I’ll be there as Tinker is lending Arduino Diecimila boards to anyone attending who wants to learn how to tinker for a few hours so do come say hi!

Tinker is proud to announce a special edition workshop series organised in partnership with Arup. 3 workshops covering the subjects of Interactive Lighting, Wireless interactions and Networked spaces will take place at Arup’s headquarters in London during the months of May and June 2008.

On May 10th and 11th, the Interactive Lighting workshop will take place, lead by Massimo Banzi, CTO of Tinker. This hands-on workshop will also include presentations from Daniel Hirschmann of Jason Bruges Studio and Francesco Anselmo from Arup. During the course of the weekend, participants will be introduced to technologies used in small as well as large interactive lighting projects and will get to build a project of their own using these technologies.

On May 31st and June 1st, the Wireless Interactions workshop will explore the use of Xbee modules and the Bluetooth Arduino in interactive projects. Lead by Gonzalo Garcia Perate, from Arup / UCL and Massimo Banzi, CTO of Tinker, this workshops will also be hands-on and allow participants to create their own mesh networks and wireless projects. We are happy to announce that Ben Cerveny will be speaking for this workshop.

On June 21st and 22nd, Usman Haque will lead participants through networked sensors, making particular use of Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) and Pachube, a web-service for connecting together and sharing real time sensor data between objects, devices and environments around the world. This will also include a presentation from Chris Leung, doctoral researcher at UCL in London.

Check out the Series site for all pricing and other details.