Is interaction

Here are some fantastic numbers about transactions, connectivity, and storage circa December 2007:

• 100 billion clicks per day on the Internet
• 55 trillion links on the Internet (same # of synapses in your brain)
• 1 billion PC chips on the Internet
• 2 million emails per second
• 8 terrabytes per second traffic
• 65 billion phone calls per year
• 255 exabytes magnetic storage (exabyte, E = 1000⁶ whereas a terabyte, T = 1000⁴)
• 1 million voice queries per hour
• 2 billion location nodes activated
• 600 billion RFID tags in use

The above statistics are from Kevin Kelly (see his TED talk).

Clay Shirky has stated that 100 million mental hours have been spent creating Wikipedia to get it to its current state (circa 2008).

• Equals 5 days of World of Warcraft play.
• Equals 4 episodes of American Idol viewing.

There is an abundance of processing power - with more on the way every day - and a cognitive surplus. Designers need to think about how to harness both in the best possible way for the best possible outcomes. If everyone particiapted in some small way during their idle time through the day (during American Idol commercial breaks?) real world problems could be addressed and perhaps solved. I’m not the only one saying this, this comes from people like Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, and Jane McGonigal.

I wasted a lot of time tonight. I got the flex sensors placed, but it seems that the wire I was using to mount was too stiff. So I wasn’t getting good readings from them. Now I have to take all the tape off of the sensors (big job, trust me), and remount them to a more maleable wire. Then I have to retest for the sensor readings. Once I get good sensor readings I can fine tune the data into acceptable ranges.

I often forget how to determine which COM port the Arduino is connected to. I’ve had to hunt down the procedure on the Internet a couple of time now. So here they are for future reference.

In Windows XP: Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System > Hardware [tab] > Device Manager > Ports (COM & LPT) [expand it]. Then look so see the COM# for the USB Serial Port

I finally got my project “working.” It took a while. I mostly blame the delay on the writing and design in the book How to Make Things Talk by Tom Igoe. It seems that my reservations about getting in to physical computing have come true. The book makes a lot of assumptions about the a priori knowledge the reader comes with.

I also fault the book design itself for causing some problems. For example, there are small boxes in the right or left column of most pages of the book. These boxes usually contain extra, more in-depth information about a particular concept or idea and, generally, not instrumental to completing a project. However, one of these boxes informs the reader to always stop the board-terminal communication via software before unplugging the USB connection. The info box goes on to warn that if the USB connection is terminated before doing a software stop, you risk crashing the software and perhaps permanent damage to the Arduino. Treating this message in the same manner as “You may want to know” extra information is irresponsible on the part of the book designers. Chiefly when there is an existing design to handle such information - a box within the central reading column, without a light blue background - unlike the “more info” boxes - and starts with a large, dark blue exclamation mark icon. So this is also, to some extent, what got me hung up trying to get the terminal software component working for this project.

Here is the issue: There is a software package for managing the Arduino board, this package is based on Possessing. The terminal utilizes software to take the data input from the Arduino board and does “something” with it. The terminal software is also Processing. The book does not make is crystal clear that once you have used the Arduino software to load a program on to the board you need to open up a Processing instance (for the terminal). I wasted a lot of time trying to manipulate the serial port variable using the Arduino software before it dawned on me that perhaps I needed to fire up Processing on the terminal (my laptop) in order to make it work. As soon as I launched Processing and loaded my Sketch - boom - it worked!

I still have some work to do before it is really working. Right now all I have is a terminal connection that can read the sensor data. It still can’t do anything cool with that data, that is the next part. Hopefully I will get some time in the next day or two to get it fine tuned and running smooth.

I am also certain that this is not my last… erm… “discussion” about what I perceive to be inadequacies in How to Make Things Talk. Having said that, I still think it is a good book. I mean, I have been able to get everything to work so far, so it can’t be all bad. But it is worth pointing out that I have a) a lot of patience b) a lot of experience doing trouble shooting and c) a lot of technical knowledge from other domains that transfers over to this domain in a lot of ways. I think that a teenager, or anyone else for that matter, coming in cold to this domain and using this book as a start point would need a whole lot of a), patience, to get through it.

So I finally got the flex sensors connected to the micro controller. I have the software set up on the board but I’m having some trouble getting it to  work properly. But, I was able to see input from the sensors, a long stram of data pouring in. Very cool. It’s a little easy doing the work on the software side, so I should have the program worked out in the next couple of days, as time permits.