Tinker it now!

We’ve just spent 2 days in the lovely Guardian offices hacking away on a little project that was presented after 24 hours. Based on an initial conversation with Stephen Abbott we thought the editorial team might enjoy picking up on the too many tweets make a twat story this week and push the idea a bit further. Thanks to the creative team of the Guardian for the lovely visuals help!

Using some motors and mosfets and playing nice with the Twitter API, we built a physical visualisation of the conversations around each party, the Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Each time an account gets retweeted, their little bubble gets closer to being a twat! If popularity and engagement on Twitter means being a twat that is :)

Check out Daniel, our interaction designer, explaining the project on video! and all the other projects are described here.

We’re back at the Guardian for the very exclusive Guardian Hackday 2. I’m doing a lightning talk to enthuse people into making their data and the internet physical using Arduino and thought I’d post the links I’m mentioning.

++ Centograph project by Tinker.it!

++ Tom Taylor’s micro-printer project

++ Ambient Orb by Nicolas O’Leary

++ Bakertweet by Poke

++ Bubblino by Ewan McEwen

Get started with:

++ Arduino website

++ Ethernet Shield specs and code examples

++ Arduino Ethernet code examples

++ DHCP library by Jordan Terrell

++ Beginners links and resources from our workshops

++ Simple Tutorials

++ Google code open source stuff by Peter Knight our senior engineer

We were bored, then we saw the lovely tshirts that Matt Jones was making, and so it felt right to make some t-shirts of our own! Check them out! there’s t-shirts and hoodies for girl and for boys!

We’ve had the great pleasure of having Ben Barker in as an intern this month and we sent him to the Weiden+Kennedy hosted viewing of TEDGlobal and asked him to sketch his way through the day’s presentations. This is a little bit about him and what he saw that day.

Starting at the beginning, I met Alex through a Nokia Live Project presentation with Kin design. From then on I was aware of tinker.it. I had been using Arduino on and off through out the year and was very interested in its potential. So after a short period of stalking, I started an internship here.

I’ve worked on a number of projects outside of my BA Design at Goldsmiths, such as the SketchTravel which follows a book around the globe as famous people draw in it and for website design company in France called Laetis as photographer . Most of my personal work can be seen on my blog . Scroll down to see the Fairy Tale project, where I researched and wrote a modern fairy tale and King’s Cross project where I built a new pedestrian cross down the road from the station.

At Tinker I’ve been helping with some of the visual side of what they do here and learning as much as possible from them about physical computing and interaction. I’m interested in Arduino and everything it has to offer but I’m very much a beginner. I enjoy taking pictures, playing with graphics and trying to make things.

We’re really lucky to have Space studios in Hackney host our autumn Beginners Arduino workshop line-up and for the first year, all the workshops are now announced until Christmas! We chose Space because their mission is very close to that of our workshops and the creative audience and we hope that relationship will help grow the community of creatives and artists working with Arduino!

SPACE is an arts and educational charity founded in 1968 by the artists Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgely. Its mission is to provide space for people to create; space for people to engage with artists, art and creativity and space for people to develop their artistic and creative potential. SPACE believes creativity is essential to a flourishing and tolerant society. Artistic enjoyment, accessing creative processes and fulfilling creative potential are intrinsic to the development of individuals and communities. SPACE works to provide the fundamental resources and opportunities needed for the positive transformation and growth of individuals & communities.

Sign up for these wonderful workshops now! Only 10 places available per workshop.

September workshop

October workshop

November workshop

December workshop

You could say I’m pretty damn honoured to have been invited to speak at the first UK edition of TEDx that will take place in Liverpool on August 7th. As a small business we’ve been really fortunate and we’re making a huge effort to connect to different areas of the UK and go boldly, out of London! So I’m very happy to say that this will be my first time in Liverpool and if you’re around, come and say hi!

Alex was kind enough to invite me to my first New Designers show, a showcase of th best student work from designs schools around the UK and I was really impressed. Some of my favorite projects included (Warning, not all of these projects were prototyped with Arduino :) ):

- The Ravensbourne MA in Interactive Digital Media students produced some really interesting and I really liked the lighting installation from Mingyu Jung.

- Mac Oosthuizen produced a really lovely project called Soundgardening.
“A means of recording sound and location information from our environment and collecting and sharing it in a way that promotes expression and collaboration. The garden addresses the constrained nature of sharing digital information by creating a tangible platform for exploration of the urban environment.”

- Dainius Slavinskas has a twist on the Cat Tracker project with “What is my cat doing now” project.

- Kirsty Gawthorne made some really beautiful decorative textile designs

- Fergus Walker designed a People powered flour mill which is “bicycle-driven grain grinding mill designed to connect the community to its local food production.”

After last weekend’s fun with Music Hackday, this weekend it’s the 4th edition (and first time in Europe) of Sketching in Harware.

Lots of great people and lots of good talks. I’ll post up a bunch of thoughts but for now, check out the portraits!

We had a great time last weekend at Music Hackday hosted by the Guardian as so many events in London in the past months. The idea behind the event was for developers to interact with online music services such as Soundcloud and Last.fm and build hacks. We tried to make that more physical and for people to interact with those APIs in a physical way somehow.

++ Peter Knight, our Senior Engineer (of Auduino fame) ran a lovely quick intro to Arduino and then it was all about the hacking and I thought I’d report on what people ended up making (among other great projects).

++ Andie Nordgren made a lovely internet of things project where physical objects embedded with RFID tags could trigger your favorite song on SoundCloud.

++ Rain Ashford used the Lilypad Arduino to trigger a cat to sing and display tweets.

++ Finally the winner of the Tinker.it! Hacking Prize was Alistair McDonald and Mr Duck who built a lovely percussion machine.

++ Peter also took the opportunity to launch Cantarino, a speech synth library for the Arduino. Watch it sing Daisy Bell and make your own!

Oh and of course no hacking event would be complete without Mitch Altman and his Trip Glasses.

++ Nice BBC Technology article on the growth of open source. They’ve also written about whether programming skills will become essential on the market and covered the latest Dorkbot event.

++ Dave Mellis, main software developer on the Arduino team, gave a talk at Reboot11 a design conference in Copenhagen last week on “Making money from open source hardware”. He was kind enough to mention Tinker.it! in his talk as well!

++ Violet, founders of the Nabaztag rabbit are coming out soon with Dal:dal a sort of ambiant web connected orb, not unlike the one from Ambient devices.

++ TInker.it!’s frequent collaborator John Nussey has just completed a series of multitouch tables for London College of Fashion end of year show. It’s on till end of July, go check it out if you’re around Oxford Circus.