photo by snootlab
Last week I went to New York for a workshop with several of our sister agencies from Dentsu Network West. Eugene & I ran a lightening-fast Arduino workshop – not enough time to explain the basics of electronics, but enough for everyone to get an Arduino running, learn how to hack programs to change what happens and even try a few different circuits (I can highly recommend the oomlaut/sparkfun Arduino kit). I’ve helped run such workshops before and it always surprises me how both easily people pick it up and how it enfranchises people to play with something they thought too dangerous – electricity.
Couple this with the news that Radio Shack will start selling Arduino kits. Maplin, in the UK, perversely sell Arduino books but not the boards themselves. I see their point: it isn’t just the Arduino you need – it’s sensors, motors, ethernet shields, driver boards, resistors, capacitors, power supplies… (actually, things that Maplin built its name on before pretty much abandoning the hobbyist community). I see far more parallels with DIY stores: a moderately large number of components that let you do 80% of what you might ever need, whether it’s gardening, plumbing, building a kitchen, wiring a room. This is computing that should live in your real world: it’s half aesthetics, half knowledge and craft. I foresee an aisle marked ‘Computation’, filled with soldering tools, sensors and microprocessors, as people start to realise that it’s possible to compute it yourself.
And I don’t mean general-purpose computers: whilst these may have started out as something for hobbyists to play with and experiment, they’re now consumer electronics that Just Works, not things to take apart or change. As Russell says “screens are expensive and holy and we can’t mess with them”. And computers are meant to do many things quite well, rather than being purposefully built to do one thing perfectly.
That’s the opposite of the computation that’s starting to take off. I joke about “sticking an Arduino on it” but that’s precisely what can be done to many problems and situations that would have previously been left to niggle. It doesn’t have to be the impressive but advanced Arduino projects that you might see on boingboing, Make magazine or hackaday – I love the utterly mundane problems that can be quite easily fixed: monitoring temperature, checking public transport status, watering your plants. Creating data, consuming data, watching it over time. Sensing and acting. It lets you look at your world in a different way and gives you the power to change it. It takes quite advanced industrial and systems engineering and makes it accessible to everyone – much like Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 did for accounting and finance, and Word and PageMaker did for DTP.
There is quite a learning curve – the demos and examples are easy, but complexity ramps up pretty quickly when you’re using additional functionality on a shield and extra libraries. Not only that, you have to get a basic understanding of both programming and electronics. But this is similar to putting up a shelf or plumbing: you start by replacing a washer and work up to welding or fixing your washing machine. Someone somewhere has fixed part of your problem before, and it’s likely they’ll have put their solution on the Internet. It’s a case of learning what to search for and how to meld all the different pieces into what you want to do.
They’re hard to break, and only £20-30 if you do so. The ability to connect a £20 computer to the Internet and let it go about its business is novel, and it’s easy to connect up to other bits of the Internet as you require. The nanode is an Arduino clone that forgoes some of the ease-of-use in return for a an easy connection to the Internet and being incredibly cheap, Pachube acts as a switchboard and storage for your data, ifttt turns data from one form into another (if you want your board to Twitter or text you). These building blocks can be glued together in almost infinite ways.
The only way to get the sense of a fully hackable world is to dive in. Order a starter kit, learn the basics of electronics and programming (this is a great page bringing together lots of beginner videos), buy a book, look at what others have made. What do you want to compute today?