Le iscrizione si sono chiuse il 5 maggio. Lo scorso fine settimana ventun fortunati hanno potuto partecipare al workshop intensivo su Arduino, tenuto da Massimo Banzi, che fa parte del cantiere milanese del progetto, ContaminaMi.

I progetti realizzati verranno presentati al workshop regionale, dove verranno selezionati i migliori lavori da portare a Skopjie, a settembre, alla Biennale dei giovani artisti. Nella fase regionale si fonderanno così le esperienze dei tre cantieri di Como, Lecco e Milano per arrivare ad un lavoro nel quale convergeranno le tecniche e le differenti esperienze creative.

Il sito, ancora in beta, ha il supporto di Mikamai!

Per vedere le altre foto, clicca qui!

English

We started out with a few events every couple of months and now it looks like there is something new every day. This is a video from last sunday Slow Lighting Event, a collaboration between Tinker.it, MIKAMAI, Metissage, Cloudify, Edoardo Piccolotto and many many other people that turned up there.  We built interactive lamps connected to twitter and facebook via some restful API that can be used by the Arduino.

Italiano

Prima era un evento ogni paio di mesi.. ora c’e’ da fare qualcosa quasi ogni giorno. Se sopravvivviamoa questo mese sarà un successo :-)  Questo è un video dell’evento Slow Lighting di domenica scorsa, fatto in collaborazione da Tinker.it, MIKAMAI, Metissage, Cloudify, Edoardo Piccolotto e un sacco di altra gente che è venuta a trovarci.  Abbiamo costruito lampade interattive connesse ai social network tramite una API Rest scritta in ruby on rails e che permette agli Arduino che comandano le lampade di mediare informazioni social attinte in tempo reale dalla rete.

Alberto D’Ottavi and Gioia Feliziani are talking about it.

All the photos are on Flickr as usual.

Il 28 e 29 marzo 2009 Tinker.it e LBi IconMedialab organizzano un workshop su Arduino a Milano. Trovate tutte le info qui.

Il workshop base di Arduino sarà tenuto da Massimo Banzi, co-fondatore di Arduino, e si focalizza su un’introduzione pratica alla piattaforma Arduino: una piattaforma di prototipazione elettronica per creativi e professionisti. Ai partecipanti verrà data una visione d’insieme del mondo dell’interaction Design, della storia di Arduino e le sue applicazioni, poi messe in pratica individualmente o in gruppi sviluppando un progetto interattivo.

Per domenica 29 invece stiamo pensando a un’interazione costruttiva tra i partecipanti al workshop e il nostro Hack Up! Così portiamo avanti le esperienze di questi mesi.

The last Hack-Up consisted of the development of 3 new projects. The code is available here.

The Arduino keynote countdown is the right™ way to control the time for the speaker and the audience. It’s an analog time-meter with a gauge display that shows the remaining time for the speech, with three coloured leds that warns the speaker when time is about to finish. Made by Costantino, Giovanni, Cristian Maglie and Luca D’Angelo.

Keep reading for more info.

The “Facebook Let’s Go Out” web application uses the Facebook API to provide an event aggregation and search service. It does it in two steps: (1) the users instruct the application to download their events. Events are merged into a common events database but the users’ identities are not stored. The database is fully anonymous (working demo here ); (2) the users query the database with a location and a day to find all the matching events. Made by Ivan, Emanuel Carnevale and Paolo Montrasio.

To conclude, the “Facebook GeekShare” app is developed by Andrea Reginato, Stefano Cobianchi, Vincenzo Acinapura e Nicolas Amato. They made a working version allowing to insert some snippets, highlight them and share with some Facebook friends.

Different unconventional projects were born in the evening. Stay tuned.

Massimo Banzi e Arduino sul primo numero di Wired Italia.

Un’intervista anche qui. Se ne parla anche su Reuters, su ZeusNews e su Panorama. Ma se ne era già parlato.

Complimenti!

Here at MIKAMAI we have been playing a lot with Arduino recently.

It’s all Massimo‘s fault, really :-)

My good friend Massimo has been giving us boards and books and we have been participating and helped organizing events such as the Hack-Up and the DorkBot Milano, where we played a  lot with both Arduino and Ruby.

The next logical step was to have Arduino boards talking to each other via the internet over some kind of ruby-based routing system.  Massimo pointed out an existing system, Pachube – which people in the know pronounce pach-be, but sound much cooler as pa-chu-be.

Pachube is a platform where people can register different kinds of sensors from all over the world.  You can ask for an API Key to receive semi-realtime feeds coming from any of the sensors.  The potential for artists and interaction designers is simply amazing.

A couple of weeks ago I was in London and I met the author, Usman Haque.  Besides being an all-around cool guy with whom I share many interests, Usman infected me with the pachube virus.  You can have a lamp lightning up in Milano when your loved one gets home in London, you can monitor your energy consumption or you can get your plant to twitter you when it’s running out of water.

As I left his place I took out the laptop and I started coding from the bus.. We put together Pachubero, a very very simple ruby library to connect to Pachube and request data from the feeds.

You can get Pachubero from GitHub.

First of all you must have a pachube key.  If you don’t, you can set the key variable to :mock to use fake example data.  If you don’t have a key, write us for an invitation. I have a few of them still left.

require 'pachubero'
 
PACHUBE_KEY = :mock
 
pachube = Pachube.new PACHUBE_KEY

you can then iterate through the feeds and get their titles

[1202, 1203].each do |n|
 
  puts pachube.feed(n).title
 
end

you can also get the info of a specific feed

f = pachube.feed(1202) 
 
puts f.id
 
puts f.title
 
puts f.status
 
puts f.description

and get all the data out of it

f.data do |tag, v, min, max|
 
  puts '-----'
 
  puts tag
 
  puts v
 
  puts min
 
  puts max
 
end

data can change in time, so you can keep polling while refreshing the feed. Pachube is not allowing a refresh rate greater than 5 seconds for the time being.

6.times do
 
  f.refresh
 
  f.value[0]
 
  sleep 10
 
end

Have fun with Pachube and Pachubero and let us know how you are using it.

MIKAMAI is proud to host the Hack-Up on January 18!

But what’s Hack-Up? And why would anybody be interested in it?

Hack-Up is an informal meeting for people sharing a common passion for technology, hacking devices and code.

It works like this: people propose different ideas and groups are self-assembled. Each group has to develop a project in 4 hours. All projects are published in an open wiki allowing anybody to use or implement them. No long term commitment, no remorse about leaving, no problem branching the project and building on it and making it your own. It’s that easy!

These are the projects we are going to focus on:

• Continue Project TAG from previous Hack-Up to create an easy way to put projects online.
• Video manipulation: flash applications to allow shared videos manipulation of virtual objects.
• Continue Arduino Jabber Knock from previos Hack-Up to get it routed via Pachoube.

Wow! I’m in! What should I do?

You may confirm your participation and join us on jan 18 at midday @Frida or at 2pm right here @MIKAMAI !