Hardware hacking at the BBC

Last week we ran a hardware hacking session at BBC Audio & Music Interactive. Two teams of three, formed from across discipines, came together on a Monday morning. At their disposal they had a Phidgets interface kit, a servo kit, a couple of RFID kits, a slightly handicapped Teleo board (the cleaners threw a load of sensors away on Thursday night!) and a Nabaztag wireless bunny.

We were aiming for something that would get people making stuff and having fun, as well as being a good team building exercise and providing a new perspective on interface design. We like the quote from the Arduino booklet...

Physical Computing is about prototyping with electronics, turning sensors, actuators and microcontrollers into materials for designers and artists. It involves the design of interactive objects that can communicate with humans using sensors and actuators controlled by a behaviour implemented as software running inside a microcontroller.

The brief we gave to the teams was to build something to do with discovering new music, but using a physical interface. And preferably involving data from the internet. 10 working hours later they had built an RFID-reading, profile creating, music recommending rabbit and a monster who rates your iTunes tracks.

The first team built Zoltar, the music predicting rabbit. This worked by swiping a number of RFID-enabled objects to build up a musical profile. These objects represented bands or genres of music; Oasis (the popular fruit drink), rock, cheese, a glitterball (disco) and a couple of red hot chilli peppers (kind of). Once the profile was complete, swiping the OK tag caused music recommendations to be generated (via last.fm) and read out by a Nabaztag rabbit.





The second team built iRate - a monster that is used to rate your tracks in iTunes. His LED teeth indicate the rating of the currently playing iTunes track and his arm can then be moved up and down to change the rating in real time. Poking the microswitch in his eye causes iTunes to skip to the next track. There was also a virtual interface showing iRate's current expression on-screen. I love the monster/box - apparently inspired by http://www.readymech.com/; free flat-pack toys to print and build.





Overall I was extremely impressed with what the teams built in such a short time. Particularly as they came to hardware hacking with little or no experience. Ideally we'd have had a day of just tinkering and hacking to get to know what the hardware and the software can do together, then we'd have a couple of days of actually building something. But, I think, everyone had fun and we had a packed demo session at the end of the second day. One of the remits of the R&D team here is to encourage innovation, in both thinking and doing, and I think this was pretty successful in getting people fired up, thinking differently and just doing stuff.

Achtung Schweinehund!

A bit of an admission, in my youth I was a wargamer. That's historical wargaming, not the Orcs and Space Marine type, which is quite different - as Harry Pearson says in his book Achtung Schweinehund!. It's reminiscences and anecdotes from his life as a gamer mixed with the history of wargaming - from Louis XIV to Martin Scorsese, HG Wells to Jerome K Jerome. If you were once, or still are, a wargamer then read this book. It's a bit unstructured and never quite gives enough detail, but it gets to the core. Like in this passage...

In my view, the aspect of wargaming that was most like real war was that it was never quite as thrilling as you hoped and imagined it would be. The little men looked splendid, the terrain was lovely, the strategic planning was great fun, but once the fighting started it all descended into a chaotic slogging match.

<snip>

The aspect of wargaming that still excited me as much as it had done when I clapped eyes on those figures in Malcolm's loft when I was twelve was the sight of the figures on the table before the action commenced. But if you skipped the battle, what was the point of the figures? If you took the wargame out of wargaming, what you were left with was a collection. And I couldn't do with that.

Quite right. Used to spend hours setting up the scenery and troops.

Feedback

Find Listen Label has just been featured on Radio 4's Feedback as 'wiki radio'. Some good questions and responses from Leigh (Radio 4 interactive) and my boss Mark. It's about 20 minutes into the programme and available on Listen Again and repeated on Sunday evening.

Hack Day

I'll be there and I'll be speaking as well. I hope we'll have some new BBC feeds around radio and music content by then and maybe some special one-off's for the weekend.

Symmetry in nature and design

I just listened to the podcast of In Our Time from a couple of weeks ago which was on the subject of symmetry.

One of the contributors mentioned that there is a theory that symmetry is particularly attractive and important to us. We find symmetrical faces more attractive for instance, because it seems to denote some kind of meaning and specialness. It is thought that we may be genetically programmed to see symmetry because if, in the chaos of the jungle, you see something with reflectional symmetry then it is probably an animal and therefore either you can eat it or it can eat you. The bumblebee has very bad vision but it is very sensitive to objects with symmetry - possibly why flowers are so symmetrical - to attract the bees.

I guess there has been plenty of work studying symmetry in art and beauty but I wonder whether symmetry is (or could) be used in design to indicate "interestingness" or importance. Could we use assymmetry and symmetry to distinguish betweeen different kinds of information on a page, the background or common elements as the assymmetrical "jungle" and information which we want to stand out as the symmetrical "animals"?

Calculating carbon footprints

I've just seen this (from Strange Attractor at XTech):

AMEE - the "Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine"

:: Measurement
Access to standardised co2 data and calculations (including the official UK Government figures)

:: Profiling
Store and retreive personal footprints

:: Sharing and Transparency
Help develop, extend, share and collaborate on the measurement of energy consumption.

It's designed as a service for other websites and campaigns that provides a REST API of CO2 data and related calculations. It can also be used to keep track of your users' carbon footprints over time.

Very interesting.

It reminds me of something I never got round to posting about tracking your daily transport habits (and hence, potentially, your carbon footprint). I was set off on this track by, I think, reading something by Julian Bleecker and playing around with some electronics. Could you use an embedded accelerometer or GPS, carried on your person, to automatically log what form of transport you are using?

An accelerometer would, I think, give you different patterns of acceleration and turning which could correlate with transport types. So frequent regular jolts would correspond to walking (as per a pedometer), lots of stopping, starting and turning would correspond to a car, smooth acceleration with gentle turns would correspond to a train and stopping every 3 minutes or so would correspond to the Underground (maybe!). It is just a hypothesis but I suspect there would be some trends there. And you should also be able to integrate the acceleration data to get approximate speed and distance.

I had a quick look at the accelerometer (Sudden Motion Sensor) in my iBook, trying out the processing API while on my daily train journey, but this only seems to give vertical acceleration or tilt data.

And you could also use GPS data, possibly in conjunction with the accelerometer. Again I would expect different patterns in the directional data from the GPS. But for what I'm proposing I think the accelerometer is more practical - that is, building a small, standalone, embedded electronics device, using something like Arduino, that is small enough to carry around with you all day. It stores all the timestamped accelerometer data and syncs every evening with your computer. This then analyses the acceleration data to give an estimate of your travel profile each day. Something like this would easily produce an (almost) real-time portrait of an individual's carbon footprint for travel and could be a very powerful tool to help people cut their footprint.