On Saturday, Andy and I headed up to Alexandra Palace to attend Mashed - a two day hack-o-thon, sponsored and organised by BBC Backstage.

The day started with a whole suite of talks. We saw presentations about Yahoo!’s YUI, SearchMonkey, and FireEagle, as well as BBC Research’s Kamaelia project (which allegedly makes writing concurrent applications ‘as easy as building lego’). There was also a talk from Lonely Planet (prop. BBC Worldwide) about how they are opening up their APIs. However, the most interesting, if the most speculative, talk came from a NASA employee about how they are planning to create autonomous self-organising nanobots to explore space and other planets!

Then, after a quick lunch, it was over to the core business of hacking. For our project, Andy and I reworked the Journey On GPS Doodle codebase to create a game of realworld Tron. For this, I hooked up a laptop displaying Google Earth’s view of Ally Pally to the massive screen, and then sent two GPS-enabled volunteers out roaming the grounds while their teammates directed them using walkie-talkies lent to us by Matt Cashmore. Their paths were then projected onto the view of the surroundings, and they had to run around trying to avoid bumping into their wakes (we wanted to add a Sketchup lightcycle to each runner as a marker, but couldn’t get that working in time).

Unfortunately, we had to leave early, so missed the all-night-hackothon, Ant Miller’s rocket, and the project presentations the next day, but I did manage to talk to a few people and spot the following inventive projects:

• Carbon Goggles
  Created by Jim Purbrick and a host of others, this sees Second Life mashed with AMEE to create a heads-up display of the carbon footprint of real-life objects that have been placed in Second Life. Click on the screenshot below to see a video.
• SocialFlightSim
  A fake wooden plane that you can sit in and control using an arcade joystick, while views of the (Google) Earth pass by on various screens, and its location is twittered to all who care to listen. Click on the photo below to see a video.

All in all, it was a fantastic event that had been very well organised. I’m hoping I’ll see some of the people again at BarCamp 3.

Update 27/6/08: I’ve just been having a look at the presentation videos, and saw that the overall winner was this great project which uses networked CurrentCost meters to play a game with your electricity consumption.

Also see:

• Other blog posts
• Flickr photos
• YouTube videos
• Footage from BBC Click

Last week I attended a half-day workshop on using RFID readers with Arduino boards, organised by Tinker. The workshop was part of a two day focus on ‘do it yourself media’ created by the Takeaway Festival, and hosted at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.

After an introductory talk, we divided into small groups, and had four hours to create a project. I was all set to create an RFID theremin, but it turned out that the MIFARE boards we were using didn’t provide signal strength information (unlike those used in the active RFID projects I mentioned in my last post).

Instead, our group settled on the plan of creating a sound recording system: users would place different RFID-tagged objects on the reader, and if it was the first time it had seen it, it would record a sound clip through the computer’s microphone. The second time you presented the object, it would play back the sound (with a bit of serendipitous echoing feedback, to create that big stadium feel). So, by constantly swapping objects, you can create your own sound effects library and make up songs as you go along. A bit like a cobbled-together version of Zoundz.

Technically, we achieved this by a very simple bit of Arduino code, coupled with a Processing script (with the Ess library) to handle recording and playback. If you’d like a copy of the source code, get in touch.

Once the 4 hours were up, it was time to present to the other groups, and to see what everyone else had done. There were lots of inventive projects, such as:

• ‘oyster spy‘
  you’d swipe your oyster card to see a pretty animation, but then the moment you turned the corner, you’d be presented with a photo of yourself that you had unwittingly triggered
• ‘body explorer‘
  this group turned the card and reader idea on its head, by concealing cards in their clothes, and having you scan them using the reader to reveal photos of various parts of their body
• ‘distorted photo booth‘
  poke your head through the hole, then swipe cards to transform your image using hall-of-mirror style effects
  ‘cheating computer‘
  roll an (RFID-tagged) dice and play against the computer, which strangely seems to win every time…

Finally, we all went down to the bar area to present our projects to a wider audience, and to watch a great performance by Sputniko and her wiimote-enabled armpit monster. All in all, it was a great day - with lots of interesting tech and lots of interesting people.

Also see:

• Takeaway Festival site
• Example code and datasheets from Tinker
• Photos on flickr

What would happen if you knew where everything was? Or if even the most insignificant items were gifted with rudimentary communication skills? Or if the history of everything was logged and stored in a way you could access from anywhere in the world?

These were some of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past week, ever since I found out that there are several projects out there that could help make these things happen. More about them in a second, but first, and explanation of how I got there.

It all started back at the Over the Air conference. Chatting to some of the other delegates, we were imagining what a ’smart’ name badge would do, and I envisioned it changing colour or displaying a message as you approached other delegates based on how your interests synced. As to how it would do it, I thought of using an embedded computing device such as the Arduino, plus wireless communication via Bluetooth.

Now this is all very plausible, but has the huge downside of cost: a setup like that would cost well over £50 per person, which, if you had hundreds of delegates, could get very very expensive. Then somebody told me about the OpenBeacon project, and I realised I’d got it all wrong.

OpenBeacon turns this idea on its head: the name badge itself does not do any computation: all it is is an RFID tag, with simple input and output (a button, a buzzer and an LED). Unlike your simple Oyster-card -style RFID, the OpenBeacon variety is ‘active’: this means that battery-power can boost the range at which it can be detected to tens of metres. Once this is coupled with lots of base-stations to detect the tags, you can use triangulation to pin-point the exact position of every person.

This has been used successfully at the Chaos Communication Congress as you can see from these videos.

So there you have it. The objects are still dumb, but they are no longer mute. You can then process and display the information on any device you like: consult your mobile phone or your laptop during an event to physically locate all the people with similar interests, for example.

If all of this sounds a bit Orwellian: you’re right. However, it all depends on who has access to the information, and how much you choose to disclose. If you yourself can get at the data, then I can imagine it being very useful. For example, you could ask the system ‘give me a list of all the people I talked to at that conference I went to two years ago’. (in practice, the exact query would have to be more like ‘get me a list of all the people who remained within a two metre radius of me for more than 5 consecutive minutes’, but you get the idea).

Equally, and potentially more relevant to the museum world, you could lend each visitor to your gallery an OpenBeacon badge, and then they could use their mobile to read extra information about the object they are standing next to without having to type in any IDs nor scan QR codes. You could also use their location data to build up a list of all the works they visited (which they could later see on a personalised website, for example), or even get them to ‘bookmark’ particular items by pressing a button when they are in front of them.

With large scale data like this, you also start entering the realm of scientists who look at bee pollination behaviour (or, more prosaically, marketers who look at web site usage statistics): individual events are not particularly significant, but when they are aggregated you can start to infer useful conclusions.

I also found some other projects with similar goals (mainly thanks to Tinker.it’s blog). The Roomware project includes open source code to track items using RFID or Bluetooth, and TimeLines is a company that specifically uses technology like this to allow participants to interact during and after events.

Meanwhile, the Pachube project takes things a whole step further, by aiming to monitor any type of object, in any location. Pachube (pronounced ‘patch bay’ apparently), is the brainchild of ambient artist Usman Haque, and allows objects to upload information about themselves to a central location using Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML). Read more about it at www.pachube.com.

Once you’ve got a client-server architecture like this, the sky’s the limit. You can have your house communicate with you via twitter, or check your energy usage from anywhere.

And so, finally, we get to the idea of a Spime, which is a neologism coined by Bruce Sterling. According to his speech at SIGGRAPH 2004:

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

Sound familiar? All of the things mentioned above seem like proto-spimes to me. And monitoring and logging projects like Pachube, SENSEI and OpenSpime are taking us a step closer.

Bring it on.

P.S. If you’re interested in the technology to get up and running with your proto-spimes, there is a free RFID and Arduino workshop as part of the mini Takeaway Festival at the Science Museum’s Dana centre next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately, unlike last year, I wasn’t able to attend any of the sessions this barcamp. However, I did manage a flying visit on Sunday morning, to attend the Cogapp-sponsored breakfast and to (fairly unsuccessfully) demo the laser-pointer graffiti system created by Theodore Watson of the Graffiti Research Lab.

I also managed to give a talk about my recent tinkering with AVR chips (as I have previously mentioned on this blog). The title of the talk was Do you want chips with that? - Physical Computing on the cheap, and you can see a copy of my presentation on slideshare.

For more information about Brighton’s second barcamp, see:

• Barcamp blog
• Backnetwork
• Photos on Flickr

I must have read dozens of books about programming and related disciplines. Some are dull as ditchwater, but a lot of these are admirably clear in explaining and presenting the information they need to get across. Very, very few are actually what I’d consider a good read, however.

So, for the record, here are three notable exceptions - techy books that made me laugh out loud:

• Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (online or hard copy)
  This book from MIT lecturer, photographer and all-round brilliant person Philip Greenspun is a great introduction to database-backed websites. Although the system he describes (ArsDigita Community Server - a mix of AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle) is esoteric and pretty much defunct, the quality of writing is excellent, and all of the underlying concepts hold true. Philip speaks with humour, passion, and has a healthy skepticism of Internet Entrepreneurs (”the world’s grubbiest club”).
• Dive into Python (online or hard copy)
  This is a super-fast-paced introduction to Python for experienced programmers, written by Mark Pilgrim. In it, he provides an extremely comprehensive introduction to Python and some real-world programming examples. However, more than this, he lets you see the kind of mindset you need to get the most out of it, as well as pre-empting a lot of potential pitfalls and nagging questions that you would have about the language and his example code. Most importantly of all, he does so with accessible prose and understated wit.
• why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby (online and hard copy)
  Written by somebody known only as why the lucky stiff, this is quite the most bonkers computer programming book I’ve ever come across. A huge, meandering journey across the Ruby landscape, copiously illustrated with cartoons and peppered with surreal asides. If you looking for ‘just the facts’, you’ve come to the wrong place, but if you want to be hugely entertained while picking up a fair bit of Ruby, then this is the book for you. Hilarious and utterly, utterly brilliant.

So… those are my picks. Leave a comment with your own suggestions for other techy books that should be considered as cracking good reads.

Continuing my newfound interest in programmable hardware, my latest project has been to create a LEGO minifig equipped with an AVR microcontroller backpack. The chip on his back (which has more computing clout than a ZX81) is used to receive input from the light-sensitive resistor in his left hand, and control output to the LED in his right. This means that by waving your hand over the LDR, you can programme him to record around thirty seconds of blinking morse code.

Thanks go to Alex Weber for his very clear instructions and C source code which showed me how to create the circuit and programme the chip. More photos are available on Flickr.

Last Saturday saw Brighton’s first Hack Day, organised by the Farm collective as part of the Digital Festival, with the venue hire (and sherbet flying saucers) sponsored by Cogapp.

Around 40 assorted coders, thinkers and designers turned up at the Brighthelm Centre for a day of hackery: after a brief introduction by Paul Silver, it was time for everybody to ‘tag’ themselves using specially created stickers to indicate their abilities and requirements. Then we went round the room with each person saying who they were and what sort of thing they’d like to work on.

After that, we all divided into small groups to work on our chosen projects. I worked with Paul Perrin, Jonny Cross and Georges Panis to create a Facebook app called ‘de-facer’ which allows you to scribble on any of your friends’ profile pictures using a Flash interface, and to have the resulting picture saved as an image and uploaded to a Facebook album. It’s still distinctly a work-in-progress, but if you’re interested, you can try it out by adding it to your Facebook profile.

There followed 6 hours of coding, interrupted only by lunch (sponsored by Magpie), and then it was time for the demos of the final projects. Apart from our own, the projects that were presented were as follows:

• Real-world text adventure by the Coding Dojo group
  A crazy Heath Robinson unholy mashup. A text-based adventure game was enhanced to allow real-world interaction, such as pouring hot coffee on a temperature-sensing chip, or scanning cards embedded with RFID tags. Extremely inventive and successfully delivered on time - a testament to Scrum and the the agile programming techniques that they used.
• Jokes by Tweet by Paul Silver and others
  This group used the Twitter API so that when you follow this ‘person’ it tells you a new joke every hour.
• In-browser bluescreen compositing by Jamie Campbell
  Jamie harnessed C++ and Python to allow you to mix bluescreened photos with other backgrounds within your browser.
• Semantic web friend finder by Tom Morris
  Tom created a PHP class to allow you to query RDF data to find related friends across different social media networks. This will be released as open source, and in a variety of languages shortly.
• ScOolBOok by Stamati Crook
  A web application to allow school children to upload and manage programmes they’ve written in scratch. The design aim was to be a ‘Facebook for 8 year olds’

All in all Hack Day was a great success. There were loads of interesting and passionate people there, which made for a great atmosphere. Here’s to another one next year!

Links:

Hack Day blog

Photos on Flickr

One of the welcome additions this year has been a company subscription to MAKE. Reading it, I am reminded of Wired magazine circa 1994 - the same optimism, enthusiasm and sense of unbounded possibility.

In it, people write about projects they’ve created, and a lot of them involve technology that hasn’t previously been readily available. Things start to get interesting, given that nowadays you can buy more processing power than they had for all the Apollo missions for less than a pint of beer.

For example, a lot of the projects featured in MAKE and on websites like instructables.com make use of AVR microcontrollers. These tiny chips, which cost as little as 50p, are fully fledged computers that can be programmed in C to do what you want them to.

Inspired by this, I set out to see how hard it could be to hack these things. The answer, gratifyingly, was ‘not very’. After I had purchased an eight dollar interface kit from Adafruit Industries, I bought the components necessary to create a micro LED display:

Following the great instructions from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, I built one, and then reprogrammed the chip to create a crude persistence of vision device, which could then be velcroed onto my spokes for use as a propaganda tool during the Critical Mass bike ride:

So, here’s to all the Makers out there, who, armed with their AVR chips, arduinos, MAKE controllers, phidgets and BUGmodules, are busy exploring the next frontier of DIY-tech: hardware.

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Hot on the heels of barcamp comes another techy unconference, and this time we’re sponsoring it! Yes, it’s Brighton’s first Hack Day, which will take place on Saturday 17th November at the Brighthelm Centre.Hack Day is organised by local freelancer collective The Farm, as part of the Digital Festival.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but the basic idea seems to be that people from all walks of life (well, designers, developers and ‘ideas people’ at the very least) get together and spend the day in small groups creating fun projects.

Tickets are free, but limited to 80 places, so keep your eye on the official site at www.farmhackday.com to make sure you get a place once registration opens.

If you’ve got any ideas for projects that you’d like to see us work on, please leave a comment.