General

This month Radio Shack is testing the waters for a return to its roots and the DIY revolution. Parallax is supplying 500 stores across the country with XBees and other maker-oriented components. Arduinos are being supplied directly by the manufacturer*. If sales take off, the distribution will extend to Radio Shack’s 5,700 company locations and potentially to […]

We’re exploring a whimsical project to collect breathalyzer data from various locations for use in visualizing local trends in intoxication. This weekend I completed the first step by prototyping simple hardware that reacts to various amounts of booze on the breath. It’s not intended to be a finely calibrated measurement tool at all. We intend

Last week I toured San Francisco to visit some of the people who are pushing the envelope of innovation, as part of my job for Digi Collaborative R&D. It was a fantastically productive trip that has me brimming with ideas for kits, workshops, design challenges and a few potentially high-profile projects. My stops included Frog

The Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture & Design Acquisition Committee has approved the addition of Botanicalls to the MoMA permanent collection. This means that after the Talk to Me exhibition closes, Botanicalls will join the likes of Eames chairs the BIC pen, Frank Lloyd Wright, and  Starry Night. It’s a huge honor and we’d like to thank the acquisition committee, as well as the many

Digi and I will be hosting a webinar on Thursday, October 13th called “What’s Fun and New with XBee.” It will showcase some of the cool stuff that artists, innovators and interaction designers are making with device networking. Join us online at 2 PM Eastern time on the 13th. Advance registration is free.

To close out September I was invited to speak on mesh networking at Frog Design’s New York City office. Frog describes itself as a global innovation firm, creating work for clients like Apple, Disney, GE, Microsoft and many others. For their staff, I explained the basic concepts behind device networking then showed some popular modern industrial examples

Jordan Husney just completed the first hands-on video for setting up the XBee Internet Gateway. It shows how to load the software on your ConnectPort, and then test it out using an XBee radio connected to your computer. By the way, in case you’re diggin’ the jingle, we made it available as a ringtone. Here’s the

Presented “Fun with XBees” at Maker Faire New York yesterday, including work by Jen Lewin, Eric Beug, Limor Fried, Elly Bowness and the Rockwell Group. The talk, which is becoming one of my standards, shows the cool things people are doing with device networking and how you can join them. This is really part of

The latest version of the XBee Internet Gateway is available today. XIG 1.3.0 includes several groundbreaking features. First there’s a new I/O Sample mode. Starting today, an XBee radio can squirt sensor information directly into the cloud  with no external microcontroller or special configuration needed. There’s also a push feature that feeds serial information down to

The next two weeks are going to be lively ones for makers in New York City! Here’s where to find me: We’re also launching my Sensitive Buildings class at ITP today plus somebody asked me to be in an Ericsson documentary that according the producer, “aims to tell a compelling story about how we are on the