GENOMICON

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$