CURIOSITY, CATS AND LOW-TECH HACKS! @brendandawes

Me in the place I love best, surrounded by possibilities.

http://bartjansen.tv/ Reasons to love technology. Take a dead cat and turn it into a helicopter.

http://lowtech.propositions.org.uk/ One of my favourite documents - from 2005, hacking cheap toys to make sensors and actuators.

I’ve always been interested in how objects can talk to one another, even Play-doh controlling the speed of video.

These days I use lots of eclectic things to make things connect to other things.

I’ve always collected things, including little bits of code that I make which then goes on to become parts of other things.

I love to collect objects, often times not knowing how I’m going to use them.

This is a lovely slide viewer that lights up when you insert a slide. It’s a switch with an integrated viewing system.

http://bareconductive.com/ Bare Paint http://www.bareconductive.com/

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.

A little video demo of the Saul Bass capacitive switch.

Cheap everyday tins make good containers for projects.

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.

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.

Various types of Arduino; the Uno, the Seeeduino and the rather wonderful Nanode with built in Ethernet.

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A box containing archived SMS between me and my wife...

Made very quickly using Arduino and Electronic Brick components.

Own the objects that surround us. This is full of features I never use...

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

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.

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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.

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• PICTURE OF HAL We are surrounded by objects that have or at least can have the ability to talk to us.

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I now build this ability to talk to me into the software I make...

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/

The Happiness Machine talks to me in a very conversational way too.

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“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

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/