Tinker it now!

The physical world is made of stuff. Stuff costs money. It has to be transported. Building things takes time. And yet software is virtual. Data. A pattern of electrons. It can move from one continent to another in a split-second, for a microscopic fraction of a penny. Installation is one mouse click away. But you can’t touch it. Software is locked behind the monitor, trapped beneath your mouse.

What if the electronic world were more like the software world? What if trying out a new circuit was as simple as downloading new software and moving a few wires around a breadboard.

There are numerous Arduinos all around the world. They are standardised and compatible – they all run the same software. They are cheap, and easy to acquire or build.

Auduino launch event

Auduino is a synthesiser based on this principle. It is based around an Arduino, with the absolute minimum of extra components. A beginner can build one in less than 15 minutes. If you have an Arduino already, the rest of the components cost little more than the price of a pint of beer. You may have everything you need in a drawer right now.

With the obstacles of ’stuff’ reduced, Auduino starts to behave like ethereal data. Money and distribution are no longer a barrier. Anyone can download with a single click. Within days of its release, experimenters around the globe were not only building Auduino, but building upon it.

Auduino was released in late 2008. Within two weeks of release, it had crossed the Atlantic with new sliding controls. In the Netherlands, it got a shiny case of aluminium. New year passed, and a cardboard encased version appeared. The Arduino Mega and new 328 based Duemilanove appeared, and Auduino was updated to support them.

By the middle of 2009, there were experiments in paper based circuit fabrication. Paperduino was swiftly followed by a paper based Auduino. Circular arrays of dials and LEDs were added. A hybrid with a stylus control. And it continued. A colour reactive synthesiser. Making sounds from fabric.

In the last few days, we have spotted a physical sequencer, and a great case made from cardboard and a Sharpie.

Auduino and many other free projects are hosted at the Tinker.it! Google Code repository.

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.

We had a great time last week at the Takeaway festival as we were invited to offer an RFID workshop. 35 people showed up from all walks of life and worked in teams on producing functional (and sometimes a bit glitchy) prototypes.

All fun though.

Have a look at some code for the Arduino and other documentation as well as some pics on Flickr!

I just couldn’t help myself, I had to announce this :) If you don’t know what to offer your loved geek for xmas, well here we have it.

We’re organising a Processing + Arduino workshop on December 8-9th lead by no other than toxi and Spencer Roberts.

Tickets are £170 and registration closes on December 3rd.

Sign up here!.

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.

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.

hi, everyone.

we fixed a few bugs and added a memory feature to this little helper application.
for who doesn’t know what it is, TinkerProxy works as a forwarder of messages coming from a serial port (for example an arduino board) to a TCP socket.
This allows you to read messages through whatever language/application supporting TCP sockets (Flash, Java, Ruby, Python etc…).

The enhancement consists enabling the application to store the latest used parameters:

• TCP port
• Serial Port
• Debug checkbox
• Add Null termination character (/0)

download, use, and please give us feedback.

thank you.

The advantage of being a network of people with such different interests and talents, is that we can release products (software/hardware) with a fast pace.
One week we release a hardware piece, the next a software one, the one after a paper about an installation, a tutorial, a tip.
I was always excited about this opportunity, because I think that a hacker-minded group can do a lot of good to the community.
This was one of the purposes of twodotone joining Tinker.it.
For example we have a Windows C++ programmer that can do many things very quickly. His name is salvatore (a.k.a. “saver”).

To cut a long story short, the intro is to announce we finally released TinkerProxy for the Windows platform.
(more…)

A while ago I wrote a small app that would execute AppleScript commands depending on the data send from an Arduino board connected to my mac. I’ve been asked a few times to release it but it was just a quick hack. Now thanks to HyperWerk in Basel, I’ve had the time to fix it a bit for a student project. I’m releasing it to see what people do with it.

Here is a screenshot :

and Here is a piece of code for Arduino

// Applescript Proxy test
// Skip to the next song on itunes every 10 seconds
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
Serial.print("A");
delay(10000);
}

What this does is that arduino sends an A every 10 seconds and that A is processed by AppleScript proxy that tells iTunes to skip to the next song…

I’m sure that there are million of uses for this… like controlling the DVD player using a light sensor or something similar… If you use it send me some feedback

This is part 1 or a bigger app I’m writing that maps a lot of events on the mac with a number of actions…

stay tuned

Download the app here

PS: It’s worth mentioning that we’re available to customise this application for your needs or build something new based on this  :)

Massimo

This is an experiment based on “frustrated total internal reflection” aka FTIR.

This is a very basic demo and we did it just to see how it work and it took us just 4 days!

The most difficult part is seting-up the hardware, in the following list you can see what we used:

• 1 panel of plexiglass 8mm thickness
• 2 strips of IR LEDs (18 LED per strip)
• 2 sheets of tracing paper
• 1 projector
• 1 mirror
• 1 analog camera sensitive to IR light
• 1 IR filter for the camera
• 1 computer

The traking was done using vvvv.

here you can see some photos of the setup

the two LED strips its must be placed on the edges of the plexiglass panel (more strips and more LEDs is, of course, better).

here you can see what happen inside the panel when you touch it (FTIR) :

Image credit Jeff Huan http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ftirschematic.gif

When you are done with this part most of the work is done!

Place the camera underneath the table, the camera must be IR sensible (almost all digital cameras, including webcams, are but they are usually fitted with an IR filter that cuts all the IR light. We must open the camera and remove it!).

Put a visible light filter in front of the camera (one of the best is just the black tail end of developed slide films).

Put the projector underneath the table with a mirror reflecting the image on the projection surface. This is needed just to be able to place the projector in a comfortable horizontal position and to gain a bit of image size.

ok have you done it?

connect all to the computer, download vvvv software from their web site (it’s not open source, but until you are using the software for non-commercial projects you don’t have to pay for using it!)

it’s a visual programming language, (like puredata, max-msp, eyesweb and so on) very easy to learn, very well done, and very robust.
Go though the tutorial, and, maybe in a couple of days you will be able to do very beautiful things.

Alessandro masserdotti
dotdotdot.it