GENOMICON

For the hardware revolution to really kick-off, we need to eliminate the DOS-Boxes.

A DOS-Box is/was… the Command Line Interface that early PCs used to use. The whole interface was one big DOS box… the Windows turned up… and the DOS box was only called into play rarely… subsequent versions of Windows further marginaliased it. It looks like this:

The trouble with DOS-Boxes is they make people’s minds go blank.

That’s why Microsoft made so much money… they brought computing to the masses by eliminating the thing that scared people off.

Soldering is the DOS-Box of electronics.

If your project requires soldering, you’ve just lost 99% of the human race.

There are actually innumerable DOS-Boxes (to varying degrees) in any type of technology that has the potential to be democratised. If people had to make their own lego blocks (with the incredibly fine tolerances involved), it would never happen. Lego does all the heavy lifting… all the low-level programming… allowing people to operate at a higher level. WordPress (which this blog is written in) has about 8 layers of this sort of thing… PHP is a language written in another (harder to understand) language for example. WordPress is written in PHP.

Anyway – most modern CAD programs are far to complicated for normal human beings to use. Forget it man, it ain’t going to happen. For CAD/CNC/Rapid-Fabbing (and therefore the open-hardware revolution) to take off, then there needs to be a lot of legoification.

There are vague movements towards this starting to emerge. One is punter-tweakablability of pre-designed-designs. This is something that Ponoko are taking a keen interest in… an example of a tweakable lampshade below:

Although… um… I can’t actually get it to go. Might be a chrome-only thing.

There’s a variant of OpenSCAD called OpenJSCAD – which allows javascript programmers to set up simple versions of this sort of thing… I made the gun barrel below… as it’s JS, it would be trivial to have drop-down parameters etc, so people could change the dimensions. The trouble with this though is that it (so far) only works with Chrome… and the resolution is dictated by the fairly low limitations of the browser. Useable… almost… but not really good enough to output directly to a machine.

A more advanced/pretty version of this is Nervous System’s DIY Jewelery App.

So I think we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing… all made possible by the rapidly dropping price of digital fabrication. Whether we see a microsoft-style universal set of interefaces remains to be seen… hardware is a lot more complicated than software – and that’s why a lot of this revolution is to do with making hardware problems, software problems.

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Another angle into this is legoification of electronics… a really good recent example is Tinkerforge… which is lowering all sorts of bars

Not least of which is the drift from languages like C++ and Java, to Python (and PHP?)… which are languages simple enough for the likes of me to understand. Still a code DOS-Box… but it gets rid of the soldering DOS-Box.

There is also a slightly lower-level version of this – for kids? I think – Littlebits…

And even further into ease-of-use land, there was a recent kickstarter thing that is basically a sensor block, that you “program” stimulus/response rules… which are about as complicated as email-filter rules. Twine.

I’m rapidly going off Kickstarter though – it’s turning into an outlet for established design shops to sell shiny jackdaw crap to fanboys. It’s not answering to needs, it’s answering to desires. Of wankers. That thing where those to dancing smoothies made a wallet out of two bits of metal with an elastic band around them, saying that your ability to choose different colours “made it an extension of who you are” made me throw up in my mouth… and they sold about $300,000 of them. Jackdaw fanboy crap of the type that swamped Carnaby St in the 80s. And don’t get me started on Quirky.com

Something that IS on Kickstarter though, and which is quite cool is the Open Beam project

Which not only radically brings down the cost of t-slot stuff, but which specifically makes it interfaceable with laser-cut acrylic, and circuit boards.

Or not, because they’ve sold out already.

$35 dollar computer – which for one such as I, is less than a night down the pub etc.

There’s a bit of a video of it here.

Most of the space seems to be taken up with adaptors etc… looks a bit like an Arduino, but is actually an entire computer.

This is not the only one of these floating around out there… but as far as I’m aware, it’s the first to ship. Notable others being the Cotton Candy one from Norway

and the Israeli CuBox

but both of those clock in at over $100.

The Pi has a case (or 2) that you can download and print

Which kindof raises the possibility of selling “products” in which the only thing that gets shipped are the vitamin parts. The rest of it you print yourself, or get someone local to do it… with a diversity of skins/themes to choose from. Maybe. Similar to the way there are about a million different smartphone cases available at the moment… but instead of this being a “case”, it’s a whole outer shell… and the bit that you buy is just a load of circuits and chips.

Just a thought like.

I’m not sure if this is competition for Arduino or not – it’s not a hell of a lot bigger or more expensive… and is a fully fledged machine that runs languages that the likes of me already understands. It could well do with having a bunch of sensor plugins as well.

Coming from the other direction though are smartphones themselves – that already have the sensors and cameras built in, already with drivers etc… and in the next 10 years, there’s going to be A LOT of these hanging about, because Android devices are currently being activated at the rate of 850,000 a day (it’s gone up 100,000 since christmas) and there are currently 300 million of them in the wild. These are going to become obsolete… and then what? Bin them? “Recycle” them? Give them to charities?

Soon there is a hell of a lot of spare computing capacity, in packages that to all intents and purposes, don’t take up any space (unlike desktops or even laptops). Suddenly having a smartphone to turn virtually any electrical device into a “smart” device, isn’t such a stupid idea.

This post is a loose collation of things that have turned up recently to do with the encroaching sensor-revolution.

Someone, somewhere else has pointed out that we’ve had successive waves of tech revolution, eg:

– the Computer Revolution brought about by cheap microprocessors
– the Communications Revolution brought about by cheap laser-switching.
– the Robotics Revolution brought about by cheap sensors

The last one is just beginning… the others have been going for a while, but are not anywhere near played out yet.

I think maybe there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about what robotics actually is – at this moment “robot” seems to include absolutely anything automated, and anything remotely controlled as well. Most washing machines are robots by the very loose definition that seems to pass in the blogosphere. In another corner is anything anthropomorphic, and in another, the more traditional “single-arm” robots that have been used in manufacturing for decades.

I think though that the dominant robotic form won’t resemble “droids” so much as “internet-leakage”… the much heralded “internet of things”. The internet is escaping… it’s getting out of the box… the boxes, and it’s ingesting and assimilating anything that uses electricity. We are right at the very very beginning of this… but it’s coming. I think that the robotics revolution is going to have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavour to it – and the dominant form is not going to be a droid or a manufacturing arm, but (like the internet itself) a human/machine hybrid.

Anyway, to that end:

1) Open Source Home Monitoring/Automation.

Home automation/monitoring is going to be huge. It’s going to be… defacto… default. I’ve gone on about this before, and (still) to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think it’s being done properly… and I think maybe it won’t every be… because it will always be evolving – so it needs to be a platform, much the same as the internet itself. The same way that there are huge numbers of web-developers, there should be huge numbers of home-app developers.

And this is where it starts. This is the physical compliment to Pachube.com

2) Siri has escaped – so that’s good news, I suppose – I don’t think Siri is a proper AI though. There are also alternatives to Siri… but I don’t think they are proper AIs either. By proper AI, I mean something that gets smarter… rather than something that is merely smart.

On the subject of Siri though – here it is being used to control a thermostat

Or to be more precise, a demo of the Siri proxy. This is not quite the same thing as the very pretty new “smart” thermostat, that learns from people’s behaviour…

This is what I mean about “getting it right”… the UI of this dial thing gets it right I think. The Semi-AI aspect of it is interesting – if it is linked to the brain-power of the web.

3) Little baby computerlet that can plug into anything

Looks like a thumb-drive, but has connectivity gear (wifi, bluetooth) built into it. Plug it into any screen, use a bluetooth keyboard and you’ve got a computer. It’s quad-core as well – so it’s got a bit of clout (for the moment). I think sometime soon the internet is going to eat broadcast television – ie: the box in the corner is going to get it’s info from the web, rather than broadcasters… this is going to make a huge different to the balance of power – which is probably no bad thing, because right now, the 4th Estate are not doing their jobs.

4) Body Monitoring… has a new poster-child,

Jawbone – a thing that measures… various things, coupled with software that measures various other things – which sounds like a bit of a chore to be honest, but if this can help people sleep better, then it’s going to sell by the truckload. I’d buy one.

This is another thing we’re going see a lot of – and god knows we (victims of first-world problems) need it.

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I have a feeling that the essence of the Monitor/Control is the feedback loop… and that feedback loops might deliver results greater than the sums of their parts. Just a suspicion. I think this is the essence of consciousness – the feedback loop. Just a suspicion.

So this is the first thing that I’ve supported on Kickstarter

It’s a sider-bearing.

“Um, yea Nick, whatever ” I hear you say. “That’s obscure. WTF?”.

Well… yea, a bit obscure I suppose… but it’s THE building block of this

Which costs about $500. The slidey bit itself costs $160, which is cheaper, but it still tears at your very soul as you hand over the cash, knowing damn well that you’re paying more than you really ought to… but that’s retail you know? Retailers tend to double the wholesale price, which is itself, a doubling of manufacturing costs. Generally. Not always, but often. What it means is that everything you see in shops costs about triple what it cost to make… and this isn’t any criticism of those in the chain, this is the cost of doing business. You need to charge triple to make the thing scalable. Open-source sidelines all that. True you do have “fuckup-costs”, but open-sourcing the design cuts out god-knows how many trial-and error iterations.

So this isn’t being made for cameras… it’s made for CNC machines… I found it when this open-source laser-cutter turned up.

It’s a big laser-cutter specifically designed to be made out of easy to source parts… there are (apparently) a couple of similar projects around the place… so this is part of a general drift… and the price is now down to $5k… which ain’t cheap, but this is a fairly big machine.

I quite like the way this has attracted a lot more investment than was being asked for – don’t know if it’s because the guy doing it runs a popular open-source-hardware website, or if people are geniunely going for the project. I genuinely went for the project. Standardised T-Slot Aluminium extrusions. Grown-up lego for building really quite sophisticated machines.

USB Protocol Analyzer.

Which is pretty cool, because if there’s one thing I hate with a fiery bloody passion, it’s anything proprietary.

I need to control my video camera from a little laptop – so I buy a little laptop, and the proprietary software says it can’t install because the screen is too small – so I need to temporarily VGA it to a bigger monitor… but I can’t because those fucking cock-wits at HP have made the VGA out a proprietary cable, without providing you with the cable – so you have to ring up HP to “buy it”, but instead you get passed around a load of people and eventually wind up with someone who doesn’t pick up the fucking phone.

So yes – the project above is probably breaking the DMCA, but the DMCA deserves to be broken and the people who lobbied for it and passed it into law deserve to be thrown off the Tarpeian rock and eaten by alligators and toddlers.

And they will be. Oh yes, they will be.

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But that aside, this is a neat little project – and it’s an example of… what? Something. It’s an example of something.

It’s an example of the abundance/scarcity divide not just being a pattern in the wallpaper, but being an actual, real, unspannable chasm… and this unspannable chasm isn’t just a biproduct of what’s going on, it IS what’s going on. It is the fundamental thing that is happening. There has been a shift in the technology, allowing this polarity – and now this polarity is driving the technology.

The killer app of Apple’s stuff is that greed-heads can control information, and create fake-scarcity. The killer app of the open web… of open-everything, is that it provides specific tools to break fake scarcity.

That’s is THE killer ecosystemic-enabler of Android – people will buy Android specifically so they can break IP law… because IP law deserves to be broken. IP law is wrong – it serves wealthy corporations who have shown total disregard for the democratic integrity of the nations that host them – so it’s a moral imperative now that they be destroyed. The fact that Murdoch and Steve Jobs teamed up recently, really ought to come as no surprise to anyone. They’re vectors of the same mental-illness. Scarcity. Control. Prevention. Prohibition.

And sometimes I worry you know? The web has been attacked a lot this year, and freedom generally is being attacked everywhere… but I sometimes get these fleeting flashes of just how big, and how powerful the memosphere really is… we’re going to sweep everything before us… and what was once just a hey-neato passing novelty – entertainment… is now war.

Still whatever. Stephen Fry told me about the OpenVizsla thing – saying he’d invested in it, and that maybe we should to. So I… will.

Ok, that came out wrong…

I meant… you know, like “Intel Inside”? And Agincourt was the classic disruptive-innovation upset (though there was a lot of bungling as well)… but basically it has become the… archetype? For when the aristocracy who’s power depends on a certain bastion/framework of incremental innovation… with the diminishing-returns that that entails (to compete you needed more and more and more expensive plate-armour)….

… meets a great unwashed who have turned up with something new, and which radically changes the economic balance.

The printing press did it big-time, and we’re well and truly into the Second Guttenberg shift right now, courtesy of back-to-back revolutions that are breaking with increasing frequency.

So anyway, I was looking at this earlier (on franken-cameras):

The way that Mark Levoy says “a single-lense, reflex camera that you buy from Canon or Nikon, is a closed, proprietary platform”… as though it is common-sense that his is a serious drawback, kindof made it dawn on me – that we’re going through a phase where every single locus of proprietary technological competition that exists, is open to an Agincourt scenario – and the key vector is open-sourcery.

Because (according to Eric Von Hippel, 3/4 of major product innovations are made by users and 85% of new product launches fail. Users are embedded in the problem. Manufacturers are embedded in the solution, so tend to make incremental adjustments to what already works.

Still… going back to the 15th Century,

Proprietary systems, copyright, patents etc etc… are all a kind of fortress… just as plate-armour was a kind of fortress… and as Nicolo Machiavelli said the last time around:

“the best possible fortress is – not to be hated by the people, because, although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the people hate you, for there will never be wanting foreigners to assist a people who have taken arms against you”

Every fortress is an opportunity.

Worth it for the picture alone:

Which looks like some sort of beautiful deep-see worm from The Abyss, or a fascimile of one of those weird Chinese dogs that mad old ladies have made out of space-age medical equipment.

It is, a microfluidic chip capable of performing 1024 (or is that 1023?) experiments at the same time. Brilliant.

There’s been a lot of talk on the DIYbio list about Sharpie-Microfluidics (“Sharpie” being American for “pen”, or maybe “one of those felt-tipped pens with the pointy ends”, but to me it sounds Australian, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Australians have a take on the English language that is disarmmingly direct, and I love it dearly

And I digress – apparently you can draw the microfluidic shape you want directly onto glass and it behaves just like a mega-bucks version.

Maybe there should be a word for the conversion of high-science to low (or at least, more democratically-dispensed) science. De-sublimation. It’s like turning gold into lead, but in a good way.

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.

Beagle Boards are (in a funny sort of way) what I imagine all computers are going to wind up like (for a while at least) – a small, portable iphone like thing that you can plug keyboards and screens and whatnot into.

I don’t think it will be Apple (or any of the other big players) that do it though. Real innovation seems to need to come out of left-field. The established players seem to evolve by tiny increments. Apple occasionally bucks this trend, but not as much as open-source is (or will)

So Beagle-Boards are an open-source computer… a step in the right direction I think – displaying (again) Amory Lovins‘ ideas about efficiency – ie: the economics of efficiency are irresistible because it allows you to completely dispense with whole subsystems. In the case of the Beagle Board, it doesn’t need fans etc.

Is it for wizards and rocket scientists and people with beards?

Yes it is.

But remember folks, there are huge sums of money to be made by creating interfaces round the wizardry/rocket-science so normal human beings can join in.

(from Lady Ada)

This one is coming from opposite directions – and is probably indicative of a wider pattern.

From one end we have high-tech solving problems we don’t actually have, but which looks cool and will probably lead on to the solution of problems we do have…

And from the other hand we have open-sourced low-tech solving problems we DO have, the technologies for which have been around for decades, but have been made unavailable to the people that need them the most – because under the aegis of “The Market”, poor people don’t matter.

Maybe one day these two will meet in the middle. I think they will – In fact I think the killer apps of the 21st century will be exactly that – high-tech that has become cheap and ubiquitous, combined with open-source ethics, solving real problems – as opposed to eye-candy for geeks.

So. That said, this is pretty cool:

Kindof like a giant reprap that grows plants. This pattern of a 2-axis thing hovering over a 3 dimensional space that it lowers in and out of to “do stuff”. This one is cool because it has multiple tools – and multiple tools is a key part of the evolution of reprappery. In fact really, there should be a standard 3D platform like this with tool “plugins” that can be developed by other people – not necessarily wanting to build an entire system from scratch. A bit like WordPress or Firefox – or any other plugin platform.

There’s more at Lady Ada’s site – Lady Ada being a tower of strength in the open-source hardware world. Top blog as well. Her site has a lot more photos and links and whatnot.

I don’t know if this answers a specific need though – maybe if you want to buy out at the bottom and can’t be arsed gardening… but there’s a lot of people out there who like gardening. I live on a hill covered in old people, and they seem to like gardening a lot – what they need is a way to do it without having to bend over all the time, not some robot to make them redundant.

I get a feeling a better solution to the problem that robot gardeners are ostensibly fixing, is some sort of social reorganisation so that people who like doing this stuff are valued a little more than they currently are. Do we need robots or do we need jobs? Who are “we” anyway?

Coming from the other direction is a new plugin for the Open-Source Tractor Project that allows two people to plant 200 hazelnut bushes in an hour. A post-hole driller. Ever tried doing this by hand? Ever tried using a petrol-powered hand-held driller? This is a massive, massive back-saver.

from openfarmtech.org

A low-tech solution to an actual problem. This tractor costs around 5,000 – about 1/10th of the price of a new proprietary tractor – and it may look clunky, but it’s rock solid. It’s lean and mean design rather than feature-rich bloatware. Again It could well turn into a plugin platform – but then I think everything should be a plugin platform.

I mean, really I am a plugin platform… but nothing plugs in at the moment, so all these enhancements like clothes or laptops or cameras or phones or knives or chainsaws with flame-throwers attached are all separate entities – there’s no direct brain-to-device interface… but there will be, oh yes, there will be.