todbot blog

While they were mentioned on Slashdot over two years ago, these “virtual keyboards” seemed to always be just a little bit further on the horizon, and to be incorporated into cell phones and PDAs, not as a stand-alone gadget amenable to hacking.

But it looks like one company, VKB has in production a stand-alone version with a serial port output. And at least one company in the US, “PC-notetaker” is selling them. For $199.

That’s just a bit expensive for casually buying one to hack apart and maybe turn into an interesting music performance gizmo. Maybe I’ll try one out anyway. I wonder how many simultaneous keypresses it can handle?

(oh wait, it looks like expansys has some for $160.95)

hardware-hacking, musicprog | No Comments »

Reminder: look into various musical illusions.

• Deutsch’s Musical Illusions
• Philomel Records Musical Illusions
• ‘Shepard Tone’ on Wikipedia

ideas | No Comments »

I’ve recently finished three books that all have more to do with one another than they might expect:

• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

The last one, while not as well written, does acknowledge the space it’s in by referencing the previous two books. (and mentioned our own Dave Pennock)

At some point I want to sit down with all three of these again and write down my slowly gelling thoughts on all of this. This is how we should design software and build robots.

ideas | No Comments »

I once had my P900 working with iSync and stuff but with various updates bluetooth connectivity has gone tits up. I’ve kinda stopped caring and just emailed things on&off the phone when needed. But it looks like others have gotten it working well:

• macosxhints - Add iSync/Address Book support for P908/P900 phones
• P900 firmware update notes

macosx | 1 Comment »

Microchip (the maker of the über-awesome PIC microcontrollers) have announced a ZigBee stack and dev kit for $199. This makes it over an order-of-magnitude cheaper than other ZigBee devkits. Granted, Microchip’s only comes with two FFD nodes, instead of 7 or 8 like the others, but still…

• Zigbee%u2122 Protocol Connectivity Solutions
• ZigBee search results on Microchip’s site

hardware-hacking | 3 Comments »

A French collegue handed out these chocolates wrapped in paper with pithy french statements on them, like fortune cookies. Mine said “L’ennui naquit un jour de l’uniformité”, which means (i think) “Ennui was born from Uniformity”.

Talk about your apropos fortunes….

general | No Comments »

Sorta like the AmbientDevices stuff,
BT Research’s ambient light uses WiFi instead of pager protocols. And makes noises. Wonder if they’ll ever release it.

hardware-hacking | No Comments »

ZigBee is a newish RF radio protocol at the same frequency of Bluetooh and 802.11b (ISC 2.4GHz). Unlike both of those protocols, it doesn’t suck (power). It’s meant to sip on batteries for months while still being part of a ZigBee mesh. And it seems to be designed to better deal in noiser environments (which the 2.4GHz band is definitely now).

There’s been at least one article in Circuit Cellar about it, I need to re-read it.

• TinyOS — small OS with ZigBee stack (?)
• Luxoft Labs: Wireless Sensor Network, ZigBee Developer Kit
• Freescale ZRP-1: ZigBee-Ready Platform
• “ZigBee starts its rise to power”
• The inevitable Slashdot article (full of punters and noobs, natch)

hardware-hacking | No Comments »