Curiosity, Cats and Low-tech Hacks!

For the first ever MKGeekNight I talk about low-tech hacks, dead cats, making with Arduino, Makerbot and Bare Conductive's conductive paint including a completely pointless Saul Bass inspired capacitive touch light switch! Includes a load of URLs in the notes at the end slide.

Transcript

1. CURIOSITY, CATS AND LOW-TECH HACKS! @brendandawes
2. Me in the place I love best, surrounded by possibilities.
3. http://bartjansen.tv/ Reasons to love technology. Take a dead cat and turn it into a helicopter.
4. http://lowtech.propositions.org.uk/ One of my favourite documents - from 2005, hacking cheap toys to make sensors and actuators.
5. I’ve always been interested in how objects can talk to one another, even Play-doh controlling the speed of video.
6. These days I use lots of eclectic things to make things connect to other things.
7. I’ve always collected things, including little bits of code that I make which then goes on to become parts of other things.
8. I love to collect objects, often times not knowing how I’m going to use them.
9. This is a lovely slide viewer that lights up when you insert a slide. It’s a switch with an integrated viewing system.
10. http://bareconductive.com/ Bare Paint http://www.bareconductive.com/
11. Take a classic piece of Saul Bass iconography, add some Bare Paint, an Arduino, a relay and a lamp and you have a Saul Bass capacitive touch light switch! No, I have no idea why either.
12. A little video demo of the Saul Bass capacitive switch.
13. Cheap everyday tins make good containers for projects.
14. These are from those toy dispensing machines that usually contain Japanese / Chinese toys. They make great handy containers that also show their contents. Put an Xbee in there, or maybe an RFID tag.
15. Super cheap toy cat from Ebay cost £3.00 but when you pull it apart you end up with a touch sensor, a speaker, a motor and a handy battery pack. Bargain.
16. Various types of Arduino; the Uno, the Seeeduino and the rather wonderful Nanode with built in Ethernet.
18. A box containing archived SMS between me and my wife...
19. Made very quickly using Arduino and Electronic Brick components.
20. Own the objects that surround us. This is full of features I never use...
21. So by adding a bit of Sugru I can “remove” the unneeded features making it more relevant for my needs and less noisy. http://www.sugru.com
22. A weather machine. Press the button and it tells me what the weather will be like in my area by connecting to the Internet and then rotating a wooden wheel to display a relevant icon together with the temperature communicated with an RGB LED.
26. The Happiness Machine. An Internet connected printer. Can print out my train times, todo list or whatever I want. All the logic is created on the server. One button simplicity.
30. • PICTURE OF HAL We are surrounded by objects that have or at least can have the ability to talk to us.
32. I now build this ability to talk to me into the software I make...
33. When a Cinema Redux print is ready it tells me via a push notification to my phone using Prowl. http://avvisoapp.com/ http://prowlapp.com/
34. The Happiness Machine talks to me in a very conversational way too.
40. “LAUGH AT PERFECTION. IT'S BORING AND KEEPS YOU FROM BEING DONE.” – Bre Pretis, The Cult of Done Manifesto http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html
41. THANK YOU brendandawes.com Resources Conductive Paint: http://bareconductive.com Sugru: http://sugru.com Prowl, send push notifications to iOS: http://prowlapp.com Push notifications from Arduino/Processing: http://avvisoapp.com/ Arduino: http://arduino.cc Nanode: http://nanode.eu Open Sense: http://open.sen.se/ Makerbot: http://makerbot.com Great cardboard engineering resource: http://robives.com/ Card modelling with Jude Pullen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reY_0AxuSWs Amazing materials: http://inventables.com Cult of Done Manifesto: http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done- manifesto.html Restduino, control Arduino over the Internet: https://github.com/jjg/RESTduino Teleduino, control Arduino via a Web service: http://www.teleduino.org/ Electronic Brick, plug-n-play for Arduino: http://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/tag/electronic- brick/