Mike D. @ ITP

SOCIALBOMB FTW!!

It is with incredible pride (and about equal parts shock and bewilderment) that I report that Socialbomb is the winner of NYU Stern’s Business Plan Competition! Out of the initial 155 teams that entered, Adam Simon, Scott Varland, Mihir Dange and I took on the last three on April 25 at the competition finals and took home both the grand prize of $50,000 and the audience’s choice award.

(Photo courtesy of NYU Stern)

What this means is not just a nice chunk of change to kick-start our business, but also a virtual pod and access to the Berkley Center’s network of faculty and professional experts. We’re of course thrilled, and can’t wait to get to work on our first games (as soon as we finish our theses, of course).

(Photo by Anaid Gomez Ortigoza)

We owe a million thanks to everyone at ITP who’s helped us along the course of the past year with this, especially Red Burns for giving us the opportunity to try out a wacko idea like this and see it throuh, Tom Igoe, Clay Shirky and Amit Pitaru in whose classes we developed the original prototypes, Marianne Petit and Nancy Hechinger for their amazing guidance and support, everyone who came to watch and cheer us on before and after, and the zillions of fellow students who convinced us we could actually do this.

So — much more to come!

¶ Posted 27 April 2008 § ITP Projects § Spring 2008 § Tech and Culture ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ITP, itp2008, socialbomb

Boards are here!

Advanced Circuits is absurdly fast. I placed the order halfway through Monday and the boards showed up on Wednesday morning. I haven’t tested them yet, though I see at least one obvious goof on my part, so we’ll see how they work.

Updates to follow.

¶ Posted 17 April 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ITP, itp2008, pcb, Thesis

Logger mania!!

So this week has been the week of logger-fixing, with me trying to shrink the footprint of my previous logger while getting better data from the one I’ve been using. Most of the decision (actually, all) to move loggers has been based on the need to adjust what I’ve been doing to fit the new boards I’ve made, which will be sweet once it all comes together. Plus, the new uSD dude has a real-time clock built in — a two-fer!

This is all a huge step up, technically and aesthetically, from the logger Jenkins and I made for Computers for the Rest of You last semester (though that was a great start!).

As I blabbered about in a previous post, I’m working on taking this platform:

And putting it out where people can use it. Part of that has been going on for the past two weeks or so, with my little monitor hanging out in the ITP lounge:

and

(This may be the first chance I’ve had to show how damn small this thing is)

It’s been great to watch, actually — I’ve explained it to a handful of people, and they’ve explained it to a handful of others, but it’s still largely a blinky light to most. However, it seems to work — once they know how it works, people will of course run over and set it off on purpose, but then they’ll often look up after loud noises to see the effect it’s had on the logger. Better yet, half the time I’ll catch people looking at it in surprise when it finds something not-as-loud that they hadn’t noticed.

So, for now, the physical side holds and is doing well. The data side is coming along, though slower. The logger, after some wrangling, outputs straight ASCII values of the ports it’s reading, which after a quick find-and-replace to get rid of spaces, comes up nicely in graphing programs.

I’m still trying to find a better way to deal with visualization, but for now Apple Numbers is doing an okay job with the smaller sets.

Though I should note that trying to read the whole initial 40k-entry set I fed it caused it to eat up 5 gigs of hard drive space and crash. Ooops.

I’ve also done up a quick Processing app that can read the data coming out of the Arduino side when patched into a computer:

and

Part of the question is to see if it helps or hurts the cause — will detailed metrics help people quantify their experiences or just add to the hassles and distractions? Time will tell!

¶ Posted 16 April 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) °

Printing Boards

Thanks in no small part to the excellent write-up from my friend and Socialbomb compatriot Adam Simon, I’ve shipped my first round of boards out to Advanced Circuits for printing. The thesis marches on!

The boards for the personal unit are both done — microphone circuit on top, Arduino on bottom — and should be here quick (Advanced Circuits RULES). The mic circuit board will make the next steps easy, and the Arduino board will make it possible to make cheap, tiny arduinos as a part of nearly everything. There are pin-outs on each board so that they can interface with others fairly easily. The sensor boards (in this case the mic board) has a six-pin out that could go either to a microcontroller or straight to an Xbee or Xport, and the Arduino boards have a six-pin out that could either go straight to a computer (through a TTL-232 cable like the ones Limor Fried sells) or to a logger unit, and there’s access to the analog ins, RX/TX and digital pins 2/3 (for SoftSerial) for any GPS/location-aware tech.

(The aforementioned TTL-232 cable)

I’ve also revised the previously-kinda-huge logger circuit to include the new uSD logger from Sparkfun — it crams the same DOSonCHIP functionality into a teensy package that fits on a board the same size as the ones I’m using, so my original goal of having a ton of add-on boards for extra functionality is even more feasible now. Either print one up, use one of mine, or just go to yer local RadioShack and solder up your own!

(Bottom-to-top: that’s the old logger, the new logger, and a 232 board for size reference)

I’m only going with the BareBonesPCB option they have, as it’s dirt cheap and fast, but if this all works I’ll print up prettier versions. I’ll also need to add

I’ve also based the size on the small square boards Radioshack sells (which I used for the prototype), as they’re juuuust big enough to accommodate an Atmega8/168 and readily available so additions to the platform are quick and easy to prototype and implement.

Of course, as things happen when one is facing a deadline, that it’s taken me the better part of a week to mock up the boards, test them out on paper, plan them around kit-available-and-cheap parts and fix the errors, but they should be here on Friday — yay!

Disclaimer: EAGLE is fun, functional, and free — but it may drive you a little crazy. If you’re thinking about doing up boards of your own, you might want to search Instructables for a tutorial (there are a bunch of good ones!) or talk to someone who’s done boards before.

¶ Posted 14 April 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (1) °

Bringing metrics to the people

I’m writing up all my thesis garbage right now, so I’ll have to explain my love of all this at a later date, but for now I wanted to post a bit about some of my favorite projects that really put data in the hands of anyone curious about it:

Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing (CamMobSens)

and

Of course, they’re doing things on phones, and half of my goal is to avoid that, but still. They showed several “google map visualisation showing some of our Carbon Monoxide data collected in Cambridge area (using Nokia mobile phones,each phone connects wirelessly to CO sensor and GPS receiver)” as well as the same tracking audio.

Of course, Intel Research’s Urban Atmospheres Group — Ergo
On-the-Go Air Quality Readings delivered to your mobile device

Part of their larger Participatory Urbanism movement.

And our own ITP favorites, Botanicalls Twitter!

And I just found this one, but I can’t believe how amazing it is:

SFEarthquakes on Twitter!

¶ Posted 11 April 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) °

Soundbox prototype testing

I took the lil’ Soundbox around the floor with me for user testing this weekend, but prior to that I got a pretty good demo of it in use. The mic does a pretty good job of picking up different kinds ofsounds from all around the room, and the light responds accordingly.
Close-up clap demo from Mike Dory on Vimeo.

What you can’t see there is that I’m running around the room, getting further away and closer up, but I did, and it works! There’s a longer demo if you want to watch that too:

Full demo from Mike Dory on Vimeo.

¶ Posted 02 April 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ITP, itp2008, light, prototype, sound, soundbox, Thesis

Soundbox prototyping

The breadboarded monster has finally been turned into a functional prototype!

The lm386 circuit I’d mentioned a bit ago here did the trick, so I just transferred the whole thing to a breadboard and slapped an Atmega168 (bootloaded with Arduino) under it. The unit has the full mic circuit on top (with mic and warm white 8,000 LED) and the Atmega circuit on the bottom with a 5v regulator-conditioned power in on one side and a 4-pin power-ground-RX-TX male header set on another. The two boards connect by a short ribbon-style cable and two header sets, as is better visible here:

¶ Posted 29 March 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ITP, itp2008, light, prototype, sound, soundbox, Thesis

Op amps o’plenty

Mic experimenting has been interesting, and by interesting I mean a lot of me cursing at circuitry. I’ve been tinkering with a few options, trying to find a light-weight circuit suitable for use in a tiny portable device. Finally, I have a circuit that’s working well for me, and it’s more or less this:

(Thank you Soyoung Park and ITP Sensor Wiki!)

I’m using a 386 because they’re cheap, low-power, and easy (insert a “your mom” joke here). They don’t require negative voltage, they can do a variety of functions, and they’re easy to find at pretty much any electronics retailer. The circuit is very similar to what Tom Igoe has in the Physical Computing book, with a bridge rectifier added to turn negative-and-positive readings into all-positive (as mics measure input by swinging voltage both positively and negatively) and a low-pass filter to get rid of some of the high-frequency noise that was giving me ugly spikes in the readings.

Breadboarded, that looks like this:

Lots more pictures in that Flickr set too.

¶ Posted 27 March 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) °

BoingBomb!

Holy crap! Socialbomb’s on BoingBoing!

It’s a sweet piece, and it was mega-nice of all the BB folks to post it. The comments are actually shockingly intelligent too — seems like people kinda get what we’re going for, and that RULES.

Edit: And now Kotaku!!

¶ Posted 25 March 2008 § ITP Projects § Tech and Culture ‡ Comments (0) °

Mic test… 1, 2, 1, 2

The past few days have been spent hunkered over a table in the pComp lab, trying to find a way to get the simple sound monitor prototype up and running — and I think I’m finally there. Or, at least, I’ve got a start. I’ve ordered some new parts, which I have to try out and mess around with, mostly mics. All mics, as it turns out, were not created equal.

I started with ye olde Radioshack PC Board condenser mic:

And eventually (mostly due to the pre-soldiered-ness and a slightly more attentive range) ended up with this guy, another Radioshack electet:

I was lucky enough to have some suggestions to check out the ITP Sensor Wiki, and found some fantastic schematics from SoYoung Park and code from Jeff Gray (thanks!!), which after some tweaking and testing brought me to this:

This is a Processing app that watches the incoming analog values from the Arduino (in this case, the audio signal), and outputs the points on the screen, moving from left to right. The red dots are the actual values, and the line is the average. For my purposes, this works splendidly, as mics output both positive and negative voltage — so in this case, with the signal coming out of the mic boosted 2.5v, watching for the average gets a really good picture of what’s going on.

¶ Posted 22 March 2008 § Thesis ‡ Comments (0) °