todbot blog » ideas

Get on the BlinkM Bus with a BlinkM Cylon

todbot — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:43:02 +0000

BlinkMs are a lot of fun by themselves, but they’re also little network devices, each having its own address on an I2C network. Here’s where I think BlinkM can really shine since it makes controlling multiple RGB LEDs pretty easy. For Maker Faire, I wanted to show off this facet by having a single Arduino control a dozen or so BlinkMs on a single I2C bus. The result is shown in the little video below.

Read on for how this was put together.

Overall Design

Controlling several RGB LEDs is no small task, BlinkM makes it easier and I wanted [...]

“WiiChuck” Wii Nunchuck Adapter Available

todbot — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:41:17 +0000

Want to hook up a Wii Nunchuck to an Arduino but don’t want to cut up the cord on your Nunchuck? Yeah me too. So I made some of these:

It’s a small PCB that adapts the Wii Nunchuck connector to standard 4-pin header. I call it the “wiichuck adapter”. It plugs directly into the Arduino, no wiring necessary. You can get one too for $4.

Available from the following wonderful shops: - FunGizmos.com. FREE DOMESTIC SHIPPING. International shipping for $1 more. - Tinker.it (UK) - Little Bird Electronics (Australia) - Sparkfun. Ships domestic & internationally. [...]

Things at ThingM, my Berkeley INFO290-13 talk

todbot — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:03:48 +0000

On Nov 8th I was a guest lecturer at the “Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces” class at UC Berkeley. It’s a physical computing course, about “a new approach to HCI which focuses on the physical interaction with computational media.” The class has both lecture and lab components. The lab section is hands-on experimenting with novel physical interfaces, using Arduino as the core. So of course I have a great fondness for the course.

The talk itself was a sort of summary of the things we’ve been pondering at ThingM. If you’re already familiar with the [...]

Smart Interface Components, my Sketching07 talk

todbot — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:24:23 +0000

The Sketching in Hardware 2 conference was a blast. So many interesting people and ideas. I wish we could have it every few months. Mike has his notes and a good summary of this year’s Sketching.

My talk was on “Smart Interface Components”. It was a generalization of the things I’ve been thinking about with the Smart LED prototypes.

Slides from the talk: sketching07-tod-smartcomponents.pdf

What are Smart Interface Components? Current interface components, the sensors and actuators that comprise the user interface of the gadgets we use, are dumb. They require specialized domain-specific knowledge to make work correctly, non-trivial [...]

LoveM Memory Chocolates technology sketch

todbot — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:14:36 +0000

Another technology sketch from my company ThingM. This time it’s Valentine’s Day-themed, with LoveM, a heart-shaped box of “memory chocolates”.

(revver link)

Abstract: LoveM is a Technology Sketch of an augmented box of chocolates that displays personal memories on an LCD screen as chocolates are removed from the box. It attempts to evoke joy and surprise through the use of available, inexpensive technology embedded into a familiar object. It investigates what happens when we put technology in a non-utilitarian, non-game context and explores the ideas of introducing personal, intimate content into an otherwise mass-produced product.

It’s also our Valentine’s Day present to you. [...]

WineM, a ThingM technology sketch

todbot — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 02:44:27 +0000

At my new company ThingM, Mike and I have completed a technology sketch for WineM, a smart wine rack. Below is a video demonstration and an abstract. A full description can be found on the ThingM site. We periodically create Technology Sketches as a way to explore the ideas we’re thinking about.

(revver link)

Abstract: WineM is a Technology Sketch of a smart wine rack. It’s designed to locate wines in a wine rack using RFIDs attached to bottles and to display which wines have been located using LED backlights behind the bottles. Collectors (or anyone with a large wine [...]

Word of the day: interfaction

todbot — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:10:29 +0000

interfaction: An interface that is interacts with you. portmanteau of interface and interaction.

For interfaces with a touch response, interfaction == haptic. But there are other kinds of interfaction. The ring of LEDs that surround a rotory encoder to show a parameters value, or keys that beep when you press them are non-haptic interfactions.

To do: Visit all Funiculars

todbot — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:57:12 +0000

Here’s something to get done before you die. Visit all known funiculars: Funiculars of the world

Musical illusions

todbot — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 00:00:40 +0000

Reminder: look into various musical illusions.

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

The Wisdom of Emergent Crowds of Tipping Points

todbot — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 19:22:10 +0000

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 [...]

Physical Music

todbot — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:04:00 +0000

There’s at least two ideas I’d love to see implemented:

Lego-esque modular MIDI controllers Physical tile-based Music Clip UI for Acid/Garageband/Logic/Cubase/etc.

Both of these ideas have been percolating around the my local noosphere for some time. So I don’t forget, or the ideas mutate, I’m going to try to describe each one.

Lego-esque modular MIDI controllers For better or worse, we’re in an age of software synthesizers, software mixers, software effects, and so on. Plug-in hell. While the malleability of software allows a diverse culture of interfaces, we humans must still interact with them with the anemic [...]

Hilighting referring search engine text in web pages

todbot — Fri, 28 May 2004 20:34:00 +0000

On some random blog I arrived on via a search engine, I noticed that the page had hilighted all the words that were part of my query. This is awesome.

I wonder if this functionality could be added as a post-processing step for all web pages before they are sent to the user. (an Apache module?) The logic could be quite simple: if( http_referer_exists && http_referer_is_search_engine ) { query = get_query_from_referer() foreach word in query { response =~ s/word/<div name=hilite>word</div>/g; } }

Hashes vs. PowerSets

todbot — Wed, 05 May 2004 22:08:00 +0000

Reminder to self: Think more about fun comparisons of hashes (allows decomposing of problems by N) and power sets (causes problems to increase in complexity by 2^N)

The former is the standard technique I’ve used to make hard problems easy or fast: divide-and-conquer. The latter is a a natural result that for any body of N nodes, full connectivity goes as 2^N: applicable in social networks, etc.

Sounds lke hashing fails to decompose power-set problems. Can we use power-sets to decompose?

Flash-based display for RRD data

todbot — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:05:00 +0000

RRDtool is a great gizmo for storing and displaying time-series data. Normally it creates PNG or GIF graphs to display info, but often I want to zoom in/out, turn on/off data lines, etc. This is normally non-trivial. But a Flash-based UI for RRD display would make it easy.

Linguistic PageRank

todbot — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:43:00 +0000

(from an email to a friend 2 July 2003)

Language is a recursive web of syntax and semantics. A.I. systems seem to have faltered in the last 20 years as they try to parse seemingly simple sentences. Given a string of words, one can interact with this recursive web, finding the interrealtionships (and bring in past conversations, ‘knowledge’ about the world, etc), but intead of diving off the end into recursive looping, could one use a PageRank-like calculation to help converge on the useful nodes that are what the sentence ‘means’. (by which I mean: prune down the web to the small set of interconnected base [...]