I met Dan from Berkeley at Macworld and his pal Andrew – they showed me a great POV (Persistence of Vision project) he just send word it’s now wirelessly updatable. Dan writes “Here’s the POV device and told you I was 30 minutes from making it wirelessly updatable. Well it took three hours instead but it works. Andrew and I are working on lower case letters and a general pattern generator interface.”
From Dan —
Here are some [more] pics, pretty rough but it’s not bad for a 2 day effort!
What is particularly nice about about this tech is that it uses tinyos (http://www.tinyos.net) on telos motes (http://www.moteiv.com). This is an open source hardware/software platform developed at Berkeley for wireless sensor networks. Think a wireless microcontroller chip (like an atmel or PIC) with higher level routing functions (mesh networking).
Though this tech isn’t very user friendly at the moment, it is very fun to hack. I spent last spring pulling hair out trying to understand the coding conventions, but it’s paid off: these nodes are pretty cheap (80 a piece and falling) and can be programmed to do many, many things via USB on any platform: there are official windows and linux installers for the dev tools and I’ve got them working happily with macs (http://www.allthingsalceste.com/tinyos-on-mac-os-x/). Another nice feature is that the networking stack can be interfaced to a java library very quickly. In a single afternoon Andrew and I hacked the code to send the POV strings through a Java GUI to the motes.
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