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I wanted to pick up a 12VDC charger for my fancy new iPhone. I peeked at Apple.com first and found one for $19.95 (plus $4 shipping). Electronics stores like Best Buy had similar offerings. Twenty plus dollars to plug my phone into a cigarette lighter seemed a little expensive especially since I happen to have a bunch of voltage regulators lying around my desk at any given point. I saw that Sparkfun had an iPod plug for $5, but I had already tried my phone with my iPod charger and it didn’t work. Current? Pins? Who knows. Then I did a quick search on eBay.

12V charger

I was skeptical. $0.99 for a charger with free shipping? But the seller had 1,377,576 feedbacks with a 99.7% success rate. Anyway, what did I have to lose; ninety-nine cents? But two days later the charger you see above arrived at my door and I’m pleased to report that it works swimmingly.

Truthfully, though, I don’t understand how this can happen. I’m currently spending a lot of time and energy trying to reduce the cost of our robots, and while I can imagine being able to make this charger so that it sells for $0.99, I have no idea how they can ship it to me (from CA to NY!) for free. It began its journey with DHL and then was transferred to the US Postal Service, so I’m not even sure where it originated from. Shenzhen?

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized        Leave a comment

Maker Faire

Maker Faire is May 30 and 31 at the San Mateo County Expo Center. If you’re going to be there, come say hi! We’re keeping a pretty low profile since our next hardware version isn’t ready yet, but you’ll find us in a corner of the MIT Media Lab booth with a pile of blocks — it’s right in between booths for the Exploratorium and Sparkfun. Three of our favorite things all lined up in a row!

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized    , ,     Leave a comment

Minimum Block
Our roBlocks prototype (above) uses seven tiny magnets on each face of each cube. On each connector, there are protruding keys (with silver cylinder magnets) and recessed keys (with gold cube magnets). When you put two blocks together, the cylinders (polarized N) attract the cubes (polarized S) and (click!) the magnetic attraction force holds them together. Little magnets are expensive, though, and can also be dangerous if little kids can get their hands on them. So we’re thinking about replacing the recessed magnets with regular old steel, but I had a hard time figuring out how this would effect the magnetic attraction force. Would it reduce it by 50% since we’re eliminating one magnet? Would it be the same since the single magnet induces poles in the steel? I asked some of the engineers in my lab and they had answers as varied as mine. I even called my friend Pete who’s an astrophysicist at a Lawrence Livermore, but that just led to a lot of mumbling and Greek letters. Finally, I broke down and called a magnet store. Their answer? Replacing one of the magnets will generally reduce the attraction force by about 15%. So there you go.

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized        Leave a comment

dsc_0069

Last weekend I got to play with an amazing group of people at a two day workshop in Boston. It was called Programming Reality: From Transitive Materials to Organic User Interfaces and was part of the CHI 2009 conference. We spent the second day at the MIT Media Lab where we broke into small groups to work on design sketches of future systems. One group made a flexible display out of silicone, another made a laser-cut laminated material that undulated from the motion of embedded paper cones. There was a rollable input device and an augmented shrine to personal robots. Our group made a prototype of an inflatable display — we built plastic pixels using the ultrasonic welder and manually inflated them through a series of tubes. Generally, we were all interested in how people are going to interact with future stuff. When everything around us is computational or robotic, how are we going to manage it all? Even now it seems that we don’t really program computers anymore, we program the world around us.

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized    ,     Leave a comment

PCB Assembly

It turns out I really had no idea how things are made! We just spent a week in Shenzhen and Guanzhou, two manufacturing cities close to Hong Kong. This is where our shoelaces, iPods, dog toys, cameras, T-shirts, bicycles, and laptops come from. We toured a bunch of different factories and tried to understand firsthand what it means to make the decision to mass-produce a piece of consumer electronics. We were only allowed to see the best (in the human rights and environmental sense) factories, but it was an eye opener how much manual labor is involved in production. This disposable cap on my water bottle was probably directly handled by six different people before it was packed to ship. One of the best parts of the trip was getting to spend some time with the amazing people in our group.  Many more photos and videos on their blogs and flickrs:

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized    , , ,     Leave a comment

creativity & cognition 09 logo

I’m helping organize the Creativity & Cognition conference.  It’s an interesting mix of artists, computer scientists, and just plain creative people.   Which leads to the question: How do kids learn to be creative?    To create is to make; so learning to make things is an important part of learning creativity.  Construction kits like Lego and Meccano offer a structured (“scaffolded”) way to make physical things; and programming languages like Seymour Papert’s Logo and Alan Kay’s Squeak have offered kids a way to make computational things.  Now we’re amidst  a revolution that brings together the physical and computational in massively parallel and distributed ways.  So, we need construction kits to scaffold kids creativity in this new world.

mark gross       Uncategorized    , ,     Leave a comment

EFRI Poster Session

I’m at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC for the annual Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation meeting.  Mark Yim gave the talk for our group, discussing progress on the Autonomously Reconfigurable Stochastic Factory.  Robots building robots building robots.  There are some amazing far-out projects here: attempts to reinvent the electrical grid, embed sensing in transportation systems, and map the brain.  A lot of stem cell projects.  Francisco Valero-Cuevas showed some research that uses a computational system to animate cadavers!  But I’m surprised to see that the majority of the talks are sort of poorly presented with text-only powerpoints.  Maybe this is where they send the projects that have cool ideas but not quite enough charisma for TED.

Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized    ,     Leave a comment

TEI 2009

I’m flying to London tomorrow for TEI 2009, an academic conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction.  It’s in Cambridge, and I’m super-excited.  We demo’d roBlocks at last year’s TEI in Bonn, and the community was really young and energetic.  Since it was a conference on tangibles, everybody seemed to have some sort of cool gadget with them.  We’ll be showing off Graphmaster, a prototype kit for playing with graph theory concepts.

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We’re changing our name!  roBlocks was a good name for our kit when it was just a research project, but it’s too similar to ROBLOX, a video game company.  We haven’t settled on the new name yet, so please answer our poll and let us know if you think one is better than the others.  Please email any suggestions to Eric (eric@roblocks.org).  If we pick your idea, we’ll send you a free 8-block kit as soon as they’re ready.

Update (March 21, 2009): Thank you for all of the suggestions and votes.  We’ve picked a name!  But I can’t tell you what it is yet so I don’t make the same mistake as last time.  But stay tuned, I’ll post the news here as soon as I’m allowed.

[polldaddy poll=1361432]
Eric Schweikardt       Uncategorized        Leave a comment