johnkeefe.net

It exists! I can't believe it!

My first book, Family Projects for Smart Objects: Tabletop Projects That Respond to Your World is in my hands. The Kindle edition is available now, and Amazon is taking preorders for the paperback edition that comes out September 24, 2016. 

It's a collection of 11 projects designed to introduce beginners to Arduinos, sensors and "internet of things" things. I tried to make it as accessible as possible, with clear instructions intended for girls, boys, women and men who have never done anything like this before.

The book grew out of my attempt to make something every week for a year (and blog about it).

Other fun facts:

• I wrote much of it on my phone riding the NYC subway to work.
• I promised myself I'd never write a book (thanks to Quinn Heraty for talking me into it).
• It's published by the folks who make Make Magazine.

If you're into making and live in the NYC area, come out to the World Maker Faire October 1-2. I'll be there both days, demonstrating some projects and talking about the book!

"Family Projects for Smart Objects" at the World Maker Faire, NY Hall of Science:

Saturday, October 1, 2016 at 2:45 p.m. — Zone 3 Make: Show & Tell Stage

Sunday, October 2, 2016 at 11 a.m. — Zone 3 Make: Show & Tell Stage

C'mon out!

How hot is a Harlem apartment?

We're trying to find out.

There are now DIY sensors in about 20 apartments, measuring the indoor heat and humidity -- in the middle of a heat wave.

It's the latest sensor journalism project from WNYC's Data News Team, in a collaboration with blog AdaptNY, community group WEACT and observation platform ISeeChange. 

And this week we worked with maker space HackManhattan, which hosted a soldering party to build more sensors.

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Between the last post and this one, I made a book!

Family Projects for Smart Objects is a collection of 11 projects based on Arduino hobby computers. They’re DIY activities designed for beginners who want to learn about sensors and make “Internet of Things” things.

Or just make stuff with people you love.

The book is currently with a team of designers who are working to make it beautiful, useful and fun.

Game plan is to publish in time for the World Maker Faire in New York this fall. If you’d like a note when it’s published, just jump onto my mailing list.

Ridiculously, that’s not all I’ve been doing. More posts ahead about cool (and hot) things I’m exploring at work and on the side.

About this time last year I set out to make something every week in 2015.

In the end, it was actually “Make Every 1.7 Weeks.” But two exciting things happened along the way:

• I made many, many more things than I would have otherwise, learning a ton.
• I was invited to write a book.

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When it comes to screen time, there are two activities where we give our daughters a lot of latitude: coding and Minecraft.

This morning I published a post on Medium called "Gardening at Night: One Dad's Guide to Minecraft." It's something I've been noodling on for a while, inspired by my daughters and by a few other parents who wanted to know how our family got started with the game.

Please let me know if it's useful to you or anyone else you know!

Separately, I've been collaborating with Jodi Jefferson to create a meetup geared for girls who play Minecraft called Girls Who Mine. We've met a couple of times, and are making it public with an event we're crafting for January. If you're interested, and live in the New York City area, jump over and add your name to the mailing list. We'll keep you posted.

Here's the high-wire act in which I describe the West Virginia University sensor-journalism project with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. This took place in a room of brilliant thinkers at Newsgeist 2015 earlier this month in Phoenix.

More details about the sensor project are available on the StreamLab site and in an earlier blog post.

“Daddy, I want to learn Python,” announced my 12-year-old daughter a couple of weeks ago. Boys in her youth group know it, she said. She wanted to, too.

Say no more.

I’ve introduced my daughters to a variety of friendly programming platforms, including Kids Ruby, Hopscotch, Codea and Lua in Minecraft. They’ve sweetly tolerated my programatic prodding. This was the first direct request.

I quickly ordered two paper copies of “Learn Python the Hard Way,” by Zed A Shaw, and we’ve been walking through each lesson together — one every week.

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I stumbled on a fun, visceral way to show how Arduinos can sense and respond.

In preparation for a presentation at the Online News Association Conference in Los Angeles, I grabbed a Ping distance sensor I had in a bin. The Ping works like a bat — it emits an inaudible, high-frequency sound, and listens for the sound to bounce off an object. The round-trip time between ping and reflection reveals the distance.

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Yesterday the Streamlab class put do-it-yourself water monitors into Gatorade bottles and anchored them in the Monongahela River near Morgantown, West Virginia. They’re now texting their data readings live.

The link to the live chart is here, and the raw data is here.

We’re sensing conductivity, which is a good indicator of dissolved solids in the water, and temperature. The locations are: upstream of an industrial site, downstream of the same site and further downstream below the Morgantown lock and dam. 

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A summer of tinkering has culminated with a conductivity and temperature sensor that texts its data from inside a Gatorade bottle.

The contraption consists of a Riffle, which is an Arduino-like board designed to fit through the mouth of a water bottle and a Fona cell-phone board. And a bottle.

The plan is to submerge several of these along a stretch of the Monongahela River as part of a sensor-journalism class at West Virginia University. It’s a work in progress, but you can [see how things are going]. My job was to build a working conductivity sensor that would report its findings live. Here are the components and how I made it go.

Update: We actually deployed some of these sensors in a river!

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