Tinker it now!

If you’ve been keeping an eye out on our recent workshops, well you might have seen this coming. As we do a lot of work with lighting companies and often deal with interactive lighting as part of client-lead projects, we thought this would be useful for creative people all around.

Tinker.it! is very proud to announce the launch of it’s first official self-standing product: the DMX interface.

The Tinker.it! DMX Interface is a device that can receive DMX messages and control different type of lights. It is designed to be powered at 12v and housed in a standard DIN enclosure.
When connected with in a DMX network, it can be used to control a 4 groups of lamps from a central location. It can be used to control Incandescent and LED lights. Up to 128 of these devices can be connected on a single cable to control up to 512 groups of lamps.

So all of you out there in the lighting world, this product is now on sale in the UK only from the Tinker store for £53.76 (including VAT).

Usman Haque, Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer will lead a 3-day informal/drop-in workshop on creating low-tech / networked sensor environments as part of the London Architecture Festival, hosted by the Hungarian Cultural Centre, London. The workshop is aimed at both designers and families with children. Together we will build an interactive environment made out of hundreds of hacked toys and gadgets which will be connected to a similar space at Kitchen Budapest, Hungary

Scattered House Workshop, London Architecture Festival, July 4-6
Hungarian Cultural Centre, 10 Maiden lane, near Covent Garden, London WC2E 7NA

Further info on the project site.

If you’re going to this year’s Reboot (10th edition wow!), Tinker will be putting together a little talk on day 1 on Arduino, it’s background and challenges attached to working with an open-source hardware platform and a short 4 hour hands-on workshop on day 2. Hope you’ll be able to join us or come and say hi!!

Details on the Reboot site.

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch.

Sounds like something we do :)

++ Twitter talks to bridges but can it talk Arduino into driving the bridge?

++ Brentford biopsy by Christian Nold

++ What if the OLPC cost 10 $?

++ Three Pieces by Simon Kirby was built with Arduino and will be exhibited at Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Check out the movie!

it’s our attempt to create an interactive musical installation that is in keeping with the natural environment of the beautifully restored Victorian Palm House. Ratherthan use computers and a PA, we decided to try and build something completely acoustic. In the end, we’ve got a traditional Chinese dulcimer and 12 chimes spread throughout the plants and foliage of the Palm House. The instruments are played robotically, controlled by two Arduinos. Motion detectors and a soil sensor allow us to react to people in the space and to the state of the plants to remix the music we’ve composed especially for the installation. The result is a strange combination of traditional and modern, organic and electronic, nature and artifice. Despite being composed in advance, the music will never be exactly the same twice, in part because it will change in response to the environment and audience, and also because the robots are a combination of accurately machined parts (e.g. mechanical solenoids) and natural materials (e.g. bamboo canes).

++ Thinking up music

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have developed technology to translate thoughts into musical notes.

The Brain Computer Interface for Music requires electrodes to be attached to the head.

They pick up electrical impulses from the brain which are passed through an electroencephalography (EEG) machine and analysed.

Yes, I never thought I’d write this but here it is… After one year of workshops, we are running our 7th Arduino Beginners workshop which will take place on June 28th-29th.

As usual tickets are £95 for professionals and £75 for students. Hope you’ll join us!

Our upcoming extended Environments workshop is quite a tricky one to explain but I think Usman does a great job on the Pachube site.

The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical “patch bay” (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to “plug-in” to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can “talk” and “respond” to each other.

Applications of this technology could be within architectural environments that wish to be monitored, every day objects in remote households that could be linked, etc… or while you’re at it, do something with my energy consumption.

Join us on June 21-22nd for a great 2 day exploration of this protocol and its applications!

If you’re a web developer or a hardware hacker, you might be interested in hooking up Arduino to the internets!

We’re very happy to announce an Arduino + Web workshop lead by superstar programmer Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr and assisted by Nick Weldin to take place on July 19-20th in a yet to be disclosed location (ping me if you’d like to host this!)

We encourage participants to have advanced knowledge of either web development or hardware (at least 6 months of experience with Arduino, attending a beginners workshop is probably not enough) to attend.

Over the weekend you might build projects like:
- A device that reads a feed from the internet such as weather forecast, stock price quote or twitter feed, and displays the information in some explicit or ambient way (eg Ambient Orb, LCD news feed display)
- A device that responds to input or sensor data and publishes it to the internet using a web API (eg pot plant that twitters when it needs watering)
- A device that acts as a web server and allows control of some other device (eg motor, lighting display) using a web interface (eg robot controlled over the internet)

Tickets are £160 for professionals and £105 for students.

Sign up quick!

++ Paul Rodgers is organising a symposium on Emerging trends in post-disciplinary creative practice in Edinburgh on June 27th. Sounds terrific and they have some great speakers lined up.

++iMal in Bruxelles have a French-language summer workshop that covers tons of cool stuff like Max/Msp, Arduino , OpenGL…

++ Nice page of documented cool wearables from Leah Buckley.