General

Just finished putting together Limor’s $22 Wave Shield for Arduino. This shield snaps on top of the Arduino microcontroller board, creating a ridiculously easy way to get audio playback into physical computing prototypes. The Wave Shield will play back uncompressed .wav files of any length from a regular SD card, either over headphones or through […]

The May 15th edition of BBC World’s Click program covered the release of the Botanicalls Kit in their News beat. This is the second time the BBC has touted Botanicalls to the English-speaking world of leaf-lovers and hopefully we can keep them all as perennial fans now that they can buy a kit.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is featuring Botanicalls as part of its Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit. The Smart Home is a real, three-story modular and sustainable “green” home in the Museum’s own backyard to teach about the ways, big and small, that visitors can make eco-friendly living a part of their

Botanicalls is continuing with open source initiatives on several fronts. We’re applying for the Rhizome commission and members should remember to vote…for us…so that we can continue to bring humans closer to the natural world. There’s also serious work underway to make kits available to the public, spurred along by an upcoming exhibition in Chicago.

Robofest is a “day-long event for youth exploring the creative world of robotics.” Kate, Jenny, Max and I were asked by Vision Ed Inc board president Marianne Petit to be judges for the DANCING WITH THE ROBOSTARS competition at Sony Wonder Technology Lab in New York City. The five competing teams of children each built

I delivered an updated version of my Designing Attraction talk on Friday evening, as part of the Speaker Series that we host. There were a some slick signs up in advance of the talk, and it was publicized online as well, so I was pleased to serenade a decent crowd. Designing Attraction is a class

This summer I’ll be teaching a graduate class called Sociable Objects at NYU that includes pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about the XBee radios including ZigBee. Here’s the course description: Sociable objects are devices that share. They can talk to each other, gain information about their context and react accordingly. Recent advances

I’ve been working on an idea for an ITP class that explores the psychology of human decision-making, and applies this powerful science to interaction design. The best way to learn something is to teach it, so on Sunday I did the first run of an hour-long presentation on the subject at BarCampNYC3. I talked about

In case you hadn’t heard, we’ve made Botanicalls Twitter as a do-it-yourself example for people who like to–well–do it themselves. It’s the first step in making Botanicalls available to a wider audience, and the online press has taken note. In the last 48 hours, we’ve been graced by the attention of: Make Magazine CNet Slashdot

Why is this man smiling? It’s because our XBee API Library for Processing now can handle multiple I/O samples in each data frame. This is a big help for projects getting high frequency data, like accelerometer information, where the sample rate needs to be very frequent. For example, if you want to take samples every