In a nod to the egg-dying we’ll be doing this weekend, I made an egg I can color from my phone.
In truth, it was the perfect excuse to play with a Metawear board I picked up a while ago. Hatched from a Kickstarter campaign, it’s a bunch of sensors and an LED packed onto a board the size of a postage stamp. You talk to it over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
The idea is that Metaware can help quickly build smart wearables and fitness trackers. To dip my toes into the process, I made an egg.
How would you build a digital candle someone could actually blow out? My 11-year-old daughter and I tried to answer that one evening, just for the fun of it.
We looked online to see if there were ways to detect breezes without a set of spinning cups. We quickly learned about hot-wire wind detectors, which monitor a warm wire and detect tiny changes of voltage as air passes over it.
Even better, we found a $17 device that does exactly that and has Ardiuno code to go with it. Score!
We bought it that night, and, quite honestly, it has been sitting in my bin of parts for months. (In the meantime we built a whole bunch of candles you extinguish by tipping over.)
So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I gave the blow-out candle a try.
Joining me on the panel are:
Sarah Williams, Assistant Professor and Director the Civic Data Design Project at MIT. Sarah's slides are here.
Nadav Aharony, co-founder and CEO at Behavio.
Matt Waite, Professor and head of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Matt's video presentation is here.
And my slides are here.