Adventures in Physical Computing, Part 1: Adaptive Path's Interaction Design Lab
Over the last several years, Adaptive Path’s business has expanded from mostly web work to a mix of web, mobile, medical devices, and consumer electronics. As our business has changed, our skills have needed to change along with it. Part of that change is gaining a comfort, understanding, and hands-on knowledge of subjects that didn’t used to be part of our vocabulary: electronics, programming, and industrial design, just to name a few.
Adaptive Path’s Interaction Design Lab
Originally uploaded by odannyboy
So as part of expanding our skills, I went and set up the beginning of an interaction design lab so that our designers had a place to work and tools to play with. I bought some basic tools like a soldering gun, some screwdrivers, wire cutters, etc. I also bought an Arduino Starter Pack and a bunch of sensors, some buttons, resistors. Other contributions made their way to the lab: our One Laptop Per Child XO machine, an old Chumby, and a touchscreen kit from Synaptics. It’s not much, but it is a start.
The most important contributions were from books though. I donated my copy of Brendan Dawes’ Analog In, Digital Out
Then I started playing.
I started working my way through Chapter 1 of Making Things Talk: downloading the software necessary to tinker with with the Arduino microprocessor. Since I learned Processing in grad school (under the patient tutelage of Golan Levin), the programming part wasn’t hard to pick up. I was able to pretty quickly make an LED light up and blink. (“If it lights up, it’s art. If it blinks, it’s interaction design.”)
But then I hit a roadblock. Near the end of Chapter 1 of Making Things Talk, which up until then had done a great job of handholding through the initial code and set up, suddenly stopped the handholding when it came to electronics and working with the physical components. So I had to put that book down and pick up Physical Computing to brush up on that, as well as start working my way through some online tutorials like the set of Arduino Tutorials.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
There are 3 comments on this idea.
having also learned Processing from Golan Levin and Ben Fry, I found the programming aspect of Arduino simple compared to the electronics. Good luck. And may you only fry a few LEDs. ;)
I went through that whole learning experience about 4 years ago (before Arduino.) I was using Basic Stamps which are less powerful but still very capable micros. I beat my head against the wall many times trying to get the simplest things to work, so if you have any questions, just ask, I’ve been there. Parallax also has some great manuals and components for learning signals, etc. Also try sparkfun.com
If you want some basic theory of analog components, Radio Shack has a great book. It’s paperback and has simple hand drawn text and illustrations I think i may have given my copy to Jeff Howard.
Good luck and try not to get frustrated by the fact that all you can do is make an LED blink at first. Things get really interesting quick if you really go for it.
[...] W. Meyer, a former executive at both Ideo and Frog Design, as their new CEO. About the same time, Dan Saffer started blogging about physical computing and his experience of learning electronics. In his first post, he says: Over the last several [...]
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