1 Arduino Fio
1 Xbee
1 ADXL335 triple axis accelerometer
with breakout board
1 electret microphone with breakout
board
9 LEDs, resistors, and some wire
(no transistors needed)
$25
$25
$25
$8
9 LEDs, 3 transistors,
resistors, and some wire
$10
TOTAL: $190
• Table 1: Cost comparison, Nimio, 2005 and today.
$8
$91
March + April 2012
interactions
surface-mount LEDs off the boards
and soldered ultra-bright LEDs and
transistors to the bare solder pads.
Though the interaction was simple,
our physical implementation took
several months and required us to
familiarize ourselves with a large
code base, irreversibly alter expensive hardware—and did we mention the chemical burns? Yet this
was still cheaper and faster than
building our own wireless, sensing, communicative hardware from
scratch. We are, after all, interaction
designers, not electrical engineers.
If we were doing the project today,
we could build the electronics and
software in just a few days, at less
than half of the cost (see Table 1).
An Arduino-based Nimio would
be not only cheaper but also much
easier to implement (and this
doesn’t account for the physical fabrication, which would also be easier
today—see our sidebar of design
resources). Designed to accommodate a variety of uses and users,
it would allow us to skip both the
daunting code base and the X-Acto-knife circuit surgery.
The availability of such cheap and
easy tools is a game changer. Not
only does it allow us to prototype
our ideas more quickly, cheaply, and
easily (getting down to the interac-
tions that we care about), but it also
enables new formats for learning
and communicating. It’s hard to
imagine, for example, TEI’s popular
studio format [ 3] thriving as it does
without the available, affordable,
and usable hardware platforms that
have become popular in the past
few years.
Open Source Hardware
While the open source hard-
ware movement is still young, it
is growing rapidly. Publications
like Make magazine, and events
such as Maker Faire and the Open
Hardware Summit, are helping to
expand the overlapping communi-
ties around DIY, hackerspaces, and
open source hardware.
