TEI Studio, making devices with Microsoft Gadgeteer

Nic Villar and James Scott from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, run a Studio on building interactive devices at TEI 2011 in Madeira. Studio's are mixture of tutorials and hands-on workshops and there were very interesting ones at this year's conference - it was very hard to choose.

Microsoft Gadgeteer is a modular platform for creating devices. It includes a main board, displays, a camera, sensors, interaction elements, motors and servos, memory board, and USB-connectors as well as power supply options. It is programmable in C# using Visual Studio. The development involves the connecting up of the hardware and the writing of the software. A "hello world" example is a simple digital camera. You connect up the main board with the camera, a display, and a button. Writing less than 20 lines of code you implement the functionality of the camera. It follows an asynchronous approach. When the buttons is pressed the camera is instructed to take a picture. An event handle is registered that is called when the camera is ready capturing the image. And in the code in the handler you take the image and show it on the display. 10 years back we worked on a European project Smart-Its [1] and started with basic electronic building blocks and the idea of open source hardware where people could create their devices. Looking now at a platform like Gadgeteer one can see that there has been great progress in Ubicomp research over that time. It is great to see how Nic Villar has been pursuing this idea from the time he did his BSc thesis with Smart-Its in our lab in Lancaster, with Pin-and-Play/Voodoo I/O [2] in his PhD work, to the platform he is currently working on and the vision beyond [3].

It was amazing how quickly all groups got this examples working. For me, with programming experience - but no real experience in C# and with little practice in programming over the last few years - it was surprising how quickly I got into programming again. To me this was mainly due to the integration with visual studio - especially the suggestions made by the IDE were very helpful. James said the design rational for the Visual Studio integration was "you should never see just a blinking cursor" - and I think this was well executed.

All groups made over the day a design. I liked the "robot-face" that showed minimal emotions… basically if you come to close you can see it getting unhappy. My mini-project was a camera that use an ultrasonic range sensor and a larger display. It takes photos when someone comes close and shows the last 8 photos on the display - overwriting the first one when it comes to the end of the screen. Interested in how little code is required to do this? Check out the source code I wrote.


Two more studios I would have loved to attend: Amanda run a Studio on creating novel (and potentially bizarre) game controllers and Daniela offered a Studio to explore what happens if bookbinding meets electronics.

[1] Holmquist, L. E., Gellersen, H., Kortuem, G., Schmidt, A., Strohbach, M., Antifakos, S., Michahelles, F., Schiele, B., Beigl, M., and Mazé, R. 2004. Building Intelligent Environments with Smart-Its. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 24, 1 (Jan. 2004), 56-64. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2004.1255810

[2] Van Laerhoven, K., Villar, N., Schmidt, A., Gellersen, H., Håkansson, M., Holmquist, L. E. 2003. In-Home Networking - Pin&Play: The Surface as Network Medium, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 41, no. 4, April 2003.

[3] Steve Hodges and Nicolas Villar, The Hardware Is Not a Given, in IEEE Computer, IEEE, August 2010