Tinker it now!

Tinker.it! had the great pleasure of helping curate the Lab space for the 10th edition of the e.magiciens festival in Valenciennes last week and I thought I’d write a quick report on the event.

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Valenciennes is a small town in the north of France very close to the border with Belgium and at the heart of a region that has decided to focus on becoming a world leader in teaching computer graphics and animation, which, considering Belgium and France’s fantastic history in comic books, comes as no surprise. This 3 day event taking place in the majestic Phenix is a hussle and bustle of activities around graduating and younger students putting together content and making movies for the closing event on the 3rd day. A sort of “cadavre exquis” is set up where students work day and night during 3 days in teams, each team creating a 10 second film slice of what will become a whole narrative. Academic establishments present included Supinfocom in Arles, a fantastic school that focuses on 3D graphics and that projected a showreel of their 20 years of work. My favorites are below.

Beyond the focus on animation and 3d design, the organisers of the festival are starting to be interested in presenting work that goes beyond the screen, which is where we were brought in. Part of the Lab space included the showcase of:

- Timelines by Something
- Scottie by Waag Society
- Tonetags by Kitchen Budapest
- We presented The Good Night Lamp as well as showed off Arduino to a whole new audience which was great fun.

Also present were:

- Hand in Cap which was built using an Arduino and tries to bring empathy to people about the disabled by experiencing some physical challenges of their own through games.
- The Dreaming Pillow project which i really loved as the best example of a new interface that deals really well with the balance between content and experience.
- Flexmo by Moukill studio was also present.

More pics on our Flickr set.

Additionally as part of the event, we put together a voting infrastructure to allow visitors to vote, using RFID cards, for their favorite pieces. Readers were put next to each exhibitor and touching in would collect votes. Lots of fun but we’re now exhausted :)

Many thanks to John Nussey for helping us setup!

++ Great project from Neville Lee using an Arduino mini: a motion responsive 3d character game.

++ Nicholas O’Leary who works at IBM has published some code to get Arduino to talk to the Current Cost meter using an arduino ethernet shield that connects and publishes to an MQTT server.

++ It’s Xmas again and London is full of interactive window displays. Check out Trafalgar Square for the latest piece from Lorenzo Hemmer.

We just spent the weekend at the BFI, giving talks and demos as part of onedotzero’s Adventures in Motion yearly festival. As part of this, we developed and showed some new tangible thoughts around music and toy hacking as well as showcased the great work of people we like.

The first in-house demo is the Auduino: a granular synthesis engine made with the Arduino platform. The code and some instructions on how to make one is all on Google Code already.

Auduino from Tinker.it! on Vimeo.

We also built RFID-enabled instruments as well as motion sensing track mixers.

Projects we showcased included John Nussey’s Dancing Robot which was first built during last January’s toy hacking workshop, Dave Chatting’s Remote Bubble Machine as well as Brock Craft’s Brockenspiel. We also built Michael Shaffer’s Ardrumo project which was great fun.

Have a look at our pics on Flickr for a taste of the event and you’ll find both presentations on Slideshare.

If you’ve been trying to sign up to this weekend’s fun at the BFI, then I don’t blame you for giving up, there have been some issues with registration, which is why we’ve setup a quick and easy registration page for both the Music and electronics and Toy Hacking talks and demos at the BFI southbank as part of onedotzero’s Adventures in Motion festival.

Hope to see you there!!!!

Took us a while i’ll admit, but the Tinker.it! team now has a public Twitter account and a Flickr account. Just to add more social and geek noise to your life :)

Enjoy!

We’re very happy to have invited Joreg co-founder of VVVV (or V4 as its sometimes called) to run an introductory workshop on VVVV in London on December 6th and 7th. Hope you’ll join us!

Sign up here.

After a couple of years of prototypes, tests and announcements, finally the Arduino team have just launched an Ethernet shield for Arduino. This module gives Arduino the ability to open connections to other Internet hosts or behave like a server, for example a simple web server.

We like this design because it uses the w5100 chip from WizNet that implements the whole IP stack in itself providing up to 4 sockets simultaneously.

I believe this will provide Arduino enthusiasts around the world with a platfrom that is initially simple to use but with room for growth as the knowledge of the user increases.

From the Internet of Things to the Internet of Arduinos, happy tinkering.