littleBits makes technology kits that are fun, easy-to-use, and infinitely creative. The kits are composed of electronic building blocks that are color-coded, magnetic, and make complex technology simple and fun. Together they’re interchangeable in millions of different ways to empower kids to invent anything - from a sibling alarm, to a wireless robot, to a digital instrument.
I was founding member of the team at littleBits Electronics as well as a lead electrical engineer and manager of the sustaining engineering team.
These images above are just some of the kits and modules I had the pleasure of working on.
As lead engineer for a small technology design firm, I was the primary hardware engineer designing and developing custom interactive technology for corporate clients, museum exhibits, public installations, retail prototyping, and custom work for individual artists. Some of our clients included The National Guard, HBO’s Game Of Thrones, NYC’s premier of the Museum of Math (MoMath), The National Constitution Center, The Children’s Museum of Houston, Stamford Children’s Hospital, University of Texas-Austin, and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
Facilitated and presented by South Bank Corporation, Arts Queensland and Unlimited: Designing for the Asia Pacific.
Supported by South Bank Corporation, having received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through art+place Queensland Public Art Fund. AnLstudio, Laing O’Rourke, Byte Logic, Webb Australia, Opus, Certis, Heyday, Flow Force, Boral, Dig It, LandPartners
Consultants:
Architect & Designer: Keehyun Ahn + Minsoo Lee / AnLstudio
Project Management: Laing O’Rourke, Byte Logic
Curator: Creativesight, Hassell
Prototyping design (interaction) consultant : Rory Nugent, Andy Doro
Electrical Engineers and Lighting/Interactive Consultants: Webb Australia
Structural engineer: OPUS
Cost Planning: Mitchell Brandtman
Building Certification: Certis
Surveying: LandPartners
Construction and Construction Management: Laing O’Rourke
Interactive Fabrication: Watthouse, Zenith, Xenian, CTI, Imaginus
Fabrication: Flow Force, Heyday
Landscaping: Dig It, South Bank Corporation, Concrete Supply: Boral
Photographs by : Jiin Kang, Tom Lenigas
SolPix is a solar-powered, sun shading, media wall system. The site-specific piece is located in the conservatory of the Cooper-Hewitt museum for “Why Design Now?” an exhibit that addresses human and environmental issues. One side of the piece is a large color LED display while the backside acts as a shading structure that also captures available sunlight as electricity via photovoltaic cells. It is a self-aware system that monitors its energy consumption as well as its solar energy production.
SolPix is a collaboration with Simone Giostra & Partners architecture firm and Jeremy Rotsztain. My role in this project was as the developer of the photovoltaic system monitor software, backend, and hardware solution.
Square Band is a small, yet powerful wearable square wave synthesizer. The Square Band is worn around the wrist and includes a set of eight buttons to trigger pitches of different octaves. Additionally, a light sensor is used to change the pitch of the tone within the octave allowing for a wide range of musical possibilities.
As the Square Band is worn throughout the day, a flexible solar panel generates and stores power for you to use whenever you choose. The Square Band is designed to be as ubiquitous as possible so that when creativity strikes you, it’s no easier than simply plugging in your headphones.
Square Band has been featured in Wired and on display at Maker Faire.
The Square Band Pocket is a smaller, battery powered version of the original wrist mounted Square Band. A square wave synthesizer with a set of eight buttons to trigger pitches of different octaves and a light sensor to adjust the pitch within the octave allowing for a wide range of musical possibilities.
The Solar Xylophone is an autonomous musical instrument that is controlled by and powered by the sun. The instrument is a metallophone outfitted with small solar panels and pager motors so that depending on the intensity of available sun light, the Solar Xylophone will play certain musical notes more or less frequently than others. The Solar Xylophone is not programmed to play any sort of musical composition, but rather it plays an unpredictable arrangement of musical notes all within the same harmonious musical scale.
The Solar Xylophone has been featured in Make Magazine as an instructional article written by myself, included in Best Of Make: Volume 2, shown at SolarOne's CitySol music festival and featured on Discovery Channel Canada's Daily Planet show.
Cell Mosaic is a book I created as a collection of cell phone photography aggregated from friends, acquaintances and strangers. From 2006 - 2008, I created and ran a website that collected these photos and displayed them online for all to see. This book is a physical evolution of that website. It is a celebration of cell phone photography, and a diary of my life and those around me.
The RPi LED array is a printed circuit board that mates directly with the GPIO (general purpose input/output) headers of a Raspberry Pi computer. This module adds a 10 LED array that can be controlled by software however you’d like. The Raspberry Pi GPIO can be accessed and controlled by many different languages, and code examples can be found at: http://elinux.org/Rpi_Low-level_peripherals
More information, including Eagle files and a shell script for testing can be found in my Github repo: https://github.com/prizepony/rpi-ledarray-eagle
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or are interested in getting your hands on one!
Living Electronics was a project that grew out of an interest of mine to find out what gives a piece of electronics or a piece of animated art a sense of life. I initially approached the project like a science experiment. I gave myself a set number of parts and tools, then began building various different kinds of robots to see which ones expressed a sense of life and which attribute or collection of attributes brought about this liveliness. Could it be the way it looked, the way it moved, the way it sounded, the way it communicated, or possibly even, the way it sustained itself?
During the process of building, I found myself realizing some interesting new techniques and approaches towards electronics. There were times where instead of making distinctly different robot models I would focus on making countless numbers of robots with only slight variations. I would use the same parts for each yet try to come up with a different arrangement with each iteration. I quickly became fascinated by this idea of an electronic object containing the same internal components but with a very different external presence. Actually, I suppose its very fitting considering how computers and electronics in general are vary malleable in their shapes despite which pieces make them up. This realization had me now approaching the building process in a very different way. Instead of treating it like an assembly line, I was becoming so comfortable with the process and my tools that I was learning to be more artistic in a way very similar to how comfortable a painter is with his or her tools. The tools may not have been the same but the process felt very similar.
These new thoughts helped me realize what I called “The Robot Knitting Circle”. I figured my brain was too restricting to how creative I could get with my robots. So, I invited other people to join me to build robots. I created kits for everyone participating. Each kit shared the same components and included schematics for guidance. The results were anything but predictable. In fact, each disparate mind build a unique robot and collectively, all the robots together and working created a really beautiful array of color, shape, and sound that could easily uphold itself as a piece of art.
