GENOMICON

from : via

Controlled by Arduino, with tutorial etc on the site.

A slightly more together looking variant here:

Machine generations.

Something I’m noticing myself now that I’m getting away (hah) from programming and more into physical stuff… the prototype is generally corrugated cardboard, wood, hacked-acrylic… what the likes of Ponoko do is reduce the gulf between “hacked proof-of-concept” to “work of art” to…

…, an evening in front of a graphics program.

What Ponoko do is reduce massively reduce the energy that is required for the Second Machine Generation.

What I’d really love for them to be able to do (do you hear this Ponoko folk?) is a same-day turnaround.

I can remember when mail-order had a standard 28 day delivery time, then Amazon was invented and destroyed that model… in the UK I’ve ordered a book from Amazon and had it in my mailbox the next morning. Ebay took up this approach, and now we kindof expect more or less instant delivery. This would be really useful for Ponoko to be able to do, because there’s an experiment-cycle. Try->fail, try->fail, try->fail, try->succeed. This can take months.

So um… the core-value that I’m getting from Ponoko is the massive attenuation of the Concept->Art process. If they want to improve their service (to Me me me) then a big thing they could do is figure a way to radically lower the turnaround time.

But I don’t know their business, or what’s involved, or if this is a reasonable thing to suggest etc… If I were to buy my own laser-cutter though, that’s the reason I’d do it. To reduce the Concept->Art process. That’s what this stuff is for. De-Sublimation.

Anyway, back to the CNC…

These are starting to show up around the place quite a bit… eg: buildyourcnc.com, but nothing quite as cheap as the one above.

From the wrong side of the tracks : Rare footage of his Grandmother, a cleaner:

from Ladyada Arduino controlled Roomba

Something that’s turned up a couple of times recently, is using an iPhone as a brain for some sort of other, slightly bigger thing, that’s got absolutely nothing to do with telephones.

eg: this electric superbike… which uses one as a dashboard.

(from : via)

I can see this happening more and more – rather than having a computer with lots of “plug and play” devices, you have a lot of devices and one computer/smart-stick etc that plugs into them.

iPhones are a bit different though – because they have eyes, ears, a sense of balance, a sense of location… a screen, an input device, web-enabled, sms-capable etc etc etc. It’s not just an extension of a brain, it’s an extension of a load of different human senses as well… though not as good as the real ones. Yet.

I can see this coming from the other end, and being a competitor for arduino actually. The potential of it is massive. Seriously… but iPhones are tethered, and they’re not open-source… and the future is open-sourced. So um… Android it is.

I think this is an amazingly good idea.

“littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.”

(via)

I’ve spent ages wracking my brains trying to figure out how to plug components together without soldering or breadboards… Magnets! – and the polarity is set up so you can’t get the wires round the wrong way.

Probably difficult to believe, but I do deliberately try not to be too robot-orientated.

This however I can’t resist because it combines so many of my favourite threads – Theo Jansen Machines, Arduinos, Rapid-Fabbing AND the designs etc are open-source, and up on Thingverse, inviting people to adapt/evolve.

(via)

Instructions / Materials / photos etc here

The bits are for sale or you can make them yourself etc… this seems to be an emerging trend with open-source hardware. Varying levels of kitset completion, priced accordingly… so if you don’t want to solder, you buy a slightly more expensive, slightly more complete one. In this case the only choices are, 1) do it all yourself, 2) buy the parts and assemble yourself.

But is it useful for anything?

Indirectly maybe – we’re learning how to do open-source hardware.

What we need I think is some sort of template – some macro-format that allows a standardised way of presenting/storing designs/part-lists/instructions/photos/videos/change-logs etc etc. We can probably apply what we’ve learned from software – but hardware is different.

If any of you are thinking of having a play with an Arduino etc – I’d highly recommend this:

Seeduino Catalyst Pack from Make… because in my experience, you’ll want most of the things there, and $79 is a bit of a bargain methinks… for the time that you’ll save finding out what you need by trial and error.

That’s what I want. Everything wifiified.

I want gadgets that can sit on my network when my laptop is away, keeping an eye on things.

For a while I’ve been tinkering (in my mind, always in my mind) with Arduino-hooked-up XBees… these:

(from www.faludi.com)

Which are as cheap as chips (expensive chips) and LadyAda goes on about them in tutorials etc over here.

Trouble is though (if I’ve got this right) they only talk to each other, so setting one up as a network device involves some other bit of kit that I don’t know about – which is probably dead simple, but I still don’t know about it.

Then I saw these…

(from Eye-Fi)

Which are appear to be about $100 – which is way too expensive, but which appear to be smaller… and which maybe behave as a network device… so it’s closer.

Why? Don’t know. But if everything is going to have a computer in it, then it needs to talk to something… and it can’t be my laptop, because it isn’t there 1/2 the time… for example, it would be quite cool to have one of these little cards in every single wall-point / light fitting to micro-manage electricity usage. Seriously – it would be so much easier to manage your myriad stand-bys, chargers, thermostats etc etc off from a single piece of web-enabled software than by going around trying to do it by hand.

In addition to that, if it was a bit of web-enabled software, then there are probably all sorts of crowd-sourcing ramifications etc. I’m sure that simply by knowing where the electricity is going, would go a long way towards stopping it going there.

This is from Tinkerkit – an “Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals.”

Which looks like a step in the direction of lowering the learning curve required for people to build their own gadgets. Not commercially available yet, but looks pretty interesting.

There you go:

Sanguino: Arduino’s Big Brother from Zach ‘Iowa’ Hoeken on Vimeo.

These guys have taken the Arduino thing which is an open source way of linking a computer to home-made electronic gadgets… and replicated/morphed it so it’s got more capacity than the original. It’s like memetic software making it’s own hardware – but (for the moment) humans are part of the loop.

I love the excitement of this – hauled out of bed at 4.30 in the morning… I can just imagine those old printing-press guys back in the day going “Dude, that’s awesome… check it out” and “this must be like 200 in Swatch Time” and so on.

Now this may seem like a hobbyist thing, but remember that the computer that you’re using to read this has this as it’s ancestor:

The machine that inspired Bill Gates to write Basic. This is how it starts.

You can buy your own from Sanguino for 25$