New products and services. The Arduino Ethernet and the Arduino Mega ADK.
The Arduino Ethernet combines a regular Arduino board with the Ethernet Shield into a single board designed to power your internet of things projects. It has the ability (if fitted with an optional module) to be powered directly from the ethernet cable using a standard called “Power over Ethernet“, this makes ideal for permanent installations in buildings and similar structures.
For example, prototypes of the board have been installed and have been operating for over a year at the “Campari Gallery” museum in Milan Italy relaying sensor data via OSC to video players and other interactive installations with amazing reliability.
You can use any FTDI compatible cable or module to program it. For this purpose we are also releasing a new USB2Serial module that is based on the same circuit that’s used in the Arduino UNO, hacking the firmware on the atmega8u2 will allow you to make amazing stuff with this cheap module.
The Arduino Mega ADK is an exciting new addition to the lineup. Google recently released an Arduino-derived open source accessory development kit (ADK) for Android phones and tablets. This is our take on the platform.
It’s essentially an Arduino Mega 2560 with the addition of a USB Host chip that communicates with the phone and a beefy power supply (the board needs to be able to charge the phone). The communication is implemented using Oleg Mazurov’s USB Host library.
The ADK Sensor Kit makes it incredibly simple to develop with the ADK because there is no need to know anything about electronics, small modular sensors and actuators plug on top of the Mega ADK letting you create protoypes or robust installations in minutes!
Later we’ll release a few code examples that will make it very easy for anyone to build Android accessories with Arduino.

Check this link for help with using these products. http://labs.arduino.cc/ADK/GettingStarted

And where to buy: http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk

Whilst cycling my bike around the Thames Path on Sunday I came across this. Slightly spooky but awesome, especially when it’s so sunny outside that your eyes take ages to react to the darkness. So for a long time you just see the hanging dress and the reflection and can’t see what it’s hanging off. Ahhhh. The pictures don’t really do it justice, you really need to go there to experience it. It’s free to check out and if you want to spend a fiver a small boy will row you round it for 15 minutes. Bargain ;-).

Installed in the Boiler House of the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station is Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto’s celebrated and oversized silk wedding dress with bamboo crinoline.

The dress is suspended from metal tanks in the Grade 2 listed (1890) Boiler House’s roof above a huge and bottomless tank of water, where it’s reflected beneath.

It was created in collaboration with scenographer and lighting designer Masao Nihei.

www.thewappingproject.com
TimeOut-info

Niklas Roy is on a roll, Electronic Instant Camera is an other new project by him. It’s a combination of an analog b/w videocamera and a thermal receipt printer.

The device is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. The camera doesn’t store the pictures on film or digital medium, but prints a photo directly on a roll of cheap receipt paper while it is taking it. As this all happens very slow, people have to stay still for about three minutes until a full portrait photo is taken.

NYC-based interactive advertising agency and research lab Breakfast NY, in collaboration with Zach Eveland, just released The Verbalizer, an open source board based on Arduino, to use with Google Voice’s search for desktop.

The Verbalizer connects wirelessly to a personal computer via Bluetooth. When you trigger it, it opens google.com in a new tab and activates Voice Search. An audio notification is played, signaling when google is ready for your queryYou speak into the mic, and the query starts. Breakfast released all the plans and firmware appropriately, and left some I/O pins open for those who want to play with it.

Foursquare-challenging check-ins

If you run the mobile app version of Google+ you can’t help but spot the Check-ins feature–it’s right there on the front page. It works with admirable simplicity: Push it, select the appropriate location which is spewed from Google Place’s database, and tap “check in.” Similar check-in status is afforded when you enable a status update to have a location attached. Privacy is neatly managed within Circles, and if you can bother to spend the time, you can change each check-in’s sharing status.

Plenty is missing from this bare-bones service: There’re no badges, no mayorships, no location-based deal vouchers in association with AmEx. in short, it’s not a game. It’s just a shared check-in service. Now, that may leave systems like Foursquare out in front since its competitive angle and, increasingly, sponsorship deals are definitely a draw to many users.
But that’s not to say that Google won’t implement some or all of these features or even surpass them–it’s not short of coders, and if Google+ takes off then it would probably be mere weeks of work to get a gaming angle built in. Foursquare, Gowalla et al.? Get a little nervous, because Google’s doing all this from an app many people will be using as default–rather than searching out Foursquare’s icon.

Color/Instagram-challenging photo sharing

Continuing Google’s recent trend of oddly askew naming, there seems to be a new social photo app called Pool Party due to hit imminently. Not much is yet known about it, other than it’s going to be directed very much at social sharing, and that it came from the seemingly free-wheeling Slide developer team inside Google. There’s already a group messaging app in Google+, Huddle, as well as a simple photo sharing app. So could Google integrate Pool Party into Google+?

Very possibly, it wouldn’t take much coder effort. And if that happened, then Google could quickly begin to challenge the exploding new social photo apps like Instagram (and, as a counterexample of a less successful enterprise, Color).

Gaming versus everyone

Buried deep inside +’s code are numerous mysterious references to “game invites,” “Google+ games,” and so on, and yet for now Google+ is a game-free arena (unless you fancy playing 20 questions with your Circles). The hints do tally with recent Google job postings, and the idea of building games into + makes good sense–it could tap into both the casual gaming meme and the social gaming meme, something that even Apple’s tried to do with Game Center. And could Google let gaming happen inside its framework without taking a 30% revenue cut like Facebook or Apple do? Sure–its income is big enough, and it could serve revenue-genreating ads all over the game portals.

Questions versus Quora, Answers.com

Also hidden in the code are references to “Questions.” There are hints about forming better questions, tagging them, sharing and commenting…and though we have little to go on other than Google’s acquisition of Aardvark (a social-based question-and-answer forum that “discovers the perfect person to answer any question in minutes”), we can speculate that Google is going to add in this power to + at some point.

Facebook

Facebook is directly challenged by many of +’s features, as well as possible upcoming ones like social photo sharing and casual gaming, but there’s one feature Facebook perhaps needs to be extremely worried about: the fact that + is “on” by default if you’re logged in to a Google account. As pointed out by AllFacebook.com, this is extraordinarily potent because if you’re using almost any Google service, the notifications center is active and will pop an alert up if you get chatted to, a status gets commented on… It makes + pervasive, particularly if you’re one of the millions upon millions of existing Gmail users. And if you’re already immersed in conversations and sharing events on + will you spend time investing in chats on Facebook?
For now, yes, since + really isn’t as polished as Facebook is for this kind of social sharing. For now.

Everything

You could take a leap of imagination and say that all these hints, combined with the always-on nature of + and the (and much needed) sleek redesign of the look and feel of Google products like Gmail, Calendars and search, are Google’s not-at-all-subtle attempt to control many of the things that most web users are doing at the moment in individual apps and services. Not all of these are going to be successful, but some will be and there are likely other features yet to be unveiled, and the juiciest bits of + may actually not be the headline-grabbing stuff you’re seeing this week.

It all hangs on whether + lasts and becomes popular, of if it’s another flash in the pan like Wave was… And that’s one heck of an enormous “if.” But just as Facebook has been busy trying to insert itself into all your other web habits, Google may be able to beat it by building specific features into + itself. All of which could earn it more ad dollars, of course, and up its stake in the ad war with Facebook and Microsoft.

Latest from the Teague Labs comes in the form of Computerless Arduino, small, inexpensive visual interface for Arduino that doesn’t require a computer to change the code, so you can take it with you and make awesome things anywhere. It consists of two major components; an Arduino-compatible microcontroller loaded with a realtime code interpreter, and a stand-alone 5 button LCD display to display port values and manipulate code. The display can be connected to the Arduino via a 4-pin port at any time to peek at In/Out values, view the current code, and make changes as desired. The team writes: By keeping the display separate, it’s possible to have many dedicated Arduino modules (we’re using one of the smallest, cheapest, and most-capable Arduino clones, the Teensy2.0for $18), without needing to spend much on each additional device. For the display we’re using the super small uLCD-144 (by 4D Systems for $29), and the system could easily be modified to use a larger display or computer if desired. The programming instruction set for the Computerless Arduino is quite small, making it easy for novices to get started while still working with real code. Navigating the user interface is a bit tedious on such a tiny display, but it’s easy to learn and provides everything you need — a basic multichannel signal scope, a code page for the setup() function which runs once at startup, and 8 pages of code for the loop() function which provides the main functionality and runs over-and-over forever. Check out the code and try it yourself at labs.teague.com