Malmo just stepped up a gear

Malmo just stepped up a gear with a new course starting this week (actually last week now). The Art Culture and Design course where I produced such greats as Mouse Trap and Crowd Subversion came to an end with Wine Salesmen.

Now Physical Computing 2 has started which is all about wiring up a control board called the Auduino (http://www.auduino.cc) to lights, buzzers and sensors of various flavours. The board is connected to the computer by the USB port and an IDE allows one to upload C based programs. The board then exectues them - the board controls the attached bells and wistles and can even talk back to the computer and take commands from it to extend funcitonality. Very Neat (yes i know, Gill - very nerdy)

As small number of you may be thinking about the term "Subes". Ben (my old flatmate) will be remember the vivid dreams he had from inhaling cloads of plastic smoke from my plastic boxes while I glued them together at 2am in the morning. Dad (bless him) will be sweating at the prospect of trying to explain rudimentary electronics to me - and getting glassy eyed blank looks in return.

"Subes" or "Sound Cubes" was the physical implementation of this idea http://steven.gistbusiness.com/flash.html#educational.html and I should really write it up in the Lab. The skinny being that it was an attempt to create small modular blocks that could be fitted together in (almost) any combination to produce a unique audible result. The result depends on the combination of blocks wired together. Each block had some interactive element to allow the user to change its behaviour. The final product befitted a student whos greatest electronic achievement is to correctly put batteries in a torch.

But it had potential and the screams of dope induced delight (Ben) around the kitchen table as the first (and most successfull) sube came to life would have been heard by the neighbours. You'd think we had just invented the toaster that night. "My god man! - do you what this means!?... our bread.. hot!!" - I wonder if they tried to toast the whole loafe first and then realised if they just heated up a bit of it they would stop running late for work after spending an hour munching through half a KG of bread... thus sliced bread? And not a require an oven sized toaster to heat up each morning.

Anyway.. Personal computing 2 is all about taking this wonderous device (the Arduino) and putting it to work in things that people can interact with. The idea is that the person should never really need to know that a computer is involved. By using light, touch, heat and sound sensors a form of input is created and, in return, some physical response is created... example siutation being (perhaps) that your cupbourd has sensors to detect how much food is present and when you run out of bread some delightful gadget SMSes you to buy some more on the way home - thus we have taken the note-on-the-back-of-your-hand to an all new level of complexity.

So in a good turn of events this course is highly practical - teaching you all the techy things you need to know and supplying people who know the product and can answer the questions. Teaching practical knowledge has (in my experience of uni) been a bit of a taboo issue and knowing how to do stuff has usually been delegated to lesser forms of life such as technical colleges or TAFE. But this is a rant for an other time - in short "I'm stoked!!"