PUBLIC MARKS with search electronics

Increasingly, hardware products (especially consumer electronics) include computers, sensors, and connections to the Internet. These capabilities enable changes in what products “know,” how they are used, and how we develop them. They are becoming more like websites. This simple fact became apparent to me during my work at Dash Navigation as their design director.

This is what you get when Casper Electronics does some circuit bending on a Nintendo NES.

We thought it appropriate to allow Twitter to be more than just an on monitor phenomena. To accomplish this we have combined an Arduino, Ethernet Shield and typewriter. We added a little bit of solder (we’re spoofing keystrokes) and some coding (available here) and what we have is a twitter monitoring machine.

littleBits, a growing library of preassembled circuitboards, made easy by tiny magnets!

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

littleBits, a growing library of preassembled circuitboards, made easy by tiny magnets!

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

The Information Ecology group (formerly the Physical Language Workshop) explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources. Through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies, we are creating seamless and pervasive ways to interact with our information—and with each other. We focus on projects that harness the ecology of consumer electronics and sensor devices—present and future—to more smoothly mediate the boundaries between the physical and information worlds we inhabit.

Sony, the Japanese electronics company, said Thursday that it expected to post a record annual operating loss of nearly $3 billion because of the rapid deterioration of the global economy. It also announced a major restructuring that will include layoffs and factory closings.

The software behind the Public Bike System tracks every bike in the system, gauging how many bikes are at each location and the functional status of each bike, as well as the status of solar panels running the system and the electronics.