Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “littleBits introduces the Arduino module – Ayah Bdeir”.
A little bit as a company or a project that was first unveiled at Maker Faire, and it’s something that I’m very excited always about saying. In 2009, the very first prototypes of little bits were handmade. I came to make her fair. I took a booth, I put them out on the table and I got mobbed by by kids and adults alike and that’s when I figured out that okay, maybe there’s a product here and about five six years, five years later, it’s a company that we’re based in New York, so I’m gon na give you a little bit of an introduction about little bit and then introduce this new exciting product that we have. The mission of little bits is to put the power of electronics in the hands of everyone, and we spent the first couple of years at little bits really focusing on the word, everyone and really focusing on making the barrier to entry very, very low for electronics.
This means that you had to have no banker but no background in engineering whatsoever, no experience in soldering and wiring and programming no matter what, in within seconds, we want to get you into electronics and what we did is we spent the first really two years building Up the core library, in order to make that happen, and now we are at this very important juncture, where we’re starting to focus on the word power. Now that we have this foundation, we want to really enable you to make powerful things and complicated things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. So if you think about kind of the larger picture, every technology that has really transformed Society has usually started in the hands of experts and something like things like printing or game development game development used to be something that only a Nintendo or Sony could do now. Anyone with a computer and a couple of weeks can make the most popular game in the App Store same thing for manufacturing. It used to be something that only large companies could do now. Anybody with a 3d printer in their bedroom can can run their own mini factory. But what about hardware? How do we democratize hardware and how do you really make it accessible to everyone so with looking at Hardware, one of the the problem that we’re solving is looking at some of these circuits. Nobody wants to make a circuit like this. Nobody. This is not the project that you have in mind, a circuit with wires with proto with proto boards with a capacitor sticking out. This is not the proud. This is a means to an end.
What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make a robot you’re trying to make an installation you’re trying to make a statement or a prototype for a company. This is not your intention or another example. On the on the left side is a breadboard version of a second 7-segment display. This is one of the most common digital displays available in electronics. It’S available in any piece of electronics. This is not a goal of a project on the left side.
This is a means to an end. What you want to do is not once on the left side, and so what we do at little bits is we take that entire circuit, the breadboard circuit, including the firmware signal conditioning any resistors capacitors any circuitry, that you need and really package it up into modules And the module turns out to be this little thing on the right, so a little mini demo. These are examples of little bits there, the modular pieces that each have one function and they snap together with magnets, so that you can’t make a mistake and you can start to create larger circuits by simply snapping more and more of these circuits together. So this is an example of pressure sensor, a bar graph and a buzzer, and suddenly you’ve made a pressure, sensitive buzzing circuit, so some examples of projects that you can make I’ll show you really quickly, and this sort of illustrates this idea of this is what somebody Is trying to make not sort of a circuit trying to make a project so we’re going to play this video? So what you have here is a remote-control robot, that we call face time robot so that you can communicate with someone across the room and it’s made of nothing but little bits, some mounting boards and an iPhone.
There was no program, programming involved whatsoever, no wiring! No experience, in fact, the person who made it as an industrial designer. If you wanted to make something like that with Lego, Mindstorms or with your other robotic platforms, it would require knowledge and engineering would require programming and, more than anything, would require you to be wanting to sort of learn all these skills, so I’ll just pause. Another example of a project that shows you this idea of means to an end. Is this instrument that one of our community members made so sound? Please, so this project is essentially a Lego made train track.
That is with it included some little bits modules called the synth bits which are analog synthesizer modules and they’re integrated with some sensors. So on the top left, you see a bent sensor and the bent sensor is activating this music, and so the whole thing becomes somewhat like an instrument and this community member who makes it actually has been putting on the website weekly. These elaborate mechanical playful instruments that are made of Lego mega Rifkin acts made of little bits and really combining sensor as well as mechanical projects, and it’s sort of this, this beautiful mashup of art and technology. So, essentially, what what we’re trying to do is really make electronics really really easy. Make it really easy, really unintimidating and really inviting to people that maybe didn’t think of themselves. As wanting to learn, electronics at all um and so part of the thing that I’m very excited about announcing today, it’s been kind of announced a little bit, but it’s even more exciting to announce.
It today is a partnership with Massimo and Massimo steam and Arduino to take this even to the next level. So if you look at the little bits library today, we have 44 bits on the market we have another 50 or so on the way there are trillions of different combinations, trillions of billions of combinations that are possible and you can literally get started with them in Seconds, however, however, up until now, you weren’t able didn’t need to, of course, but also weren’t able to program. If you wanted to. That means that the modules attached and different configurations, you can use mechanical and sensory and environmental inputs and outputs to it.
But if you wanted something a little bit more complex, you couldn’t do it until today, so the idea is that we want to take again this idea of a very complex circuit where it can be hindering to your creative process. It can be a source of frustration. You’Re trying to create, let’s say, a wireless device that communicates and suddenly you find yourself debugging where the wires are going and not understanding what’s happening, and there isn’t really kind of an output into a piece of hardware to know where the bug is and instead sort Of we take it to what you see on the right and make it this ready to use module. So this module in case of program gon na D, is the one that I’m excited about and it’s the Arduino at heart module.
So I’d like to call Matthew up now, somebody’s turn to call you come back so this this partnership between little bits and Arduino is a very, very, very natural partnership. We are gigantic fans of Arduino and what they’ve done for the maker movement they’ve inspired people who never thought of themselves as makers, designers, artists, people and also hackers to be able to program and get started very quickly and essentially we’re both trying to do the same Thing coming at it from different direction, both wanting to make making even easier sorry go ahead. No, I just saying that you know we love little bit. We thought we think that the concept is great and also you know we. I has been with us in the open source hardware communities. At the beginning. She organized one of the first events in New York years ago, so this was, I think it was a natural connection and also I want to highlight the fact that also they joined this Arduino at ARPA Roger program, which is really for companies to say you know. We support Arduino, we want, you know not only we use the Arduino technology, but we we give back its support.
We recognize the audience or you know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The really exciting piece of this is it. Like Massimo said, one of the first collaborations in the Arduino at heart program really a very, very good mash up of basically what Arduino has been doing for software and making it even easier for everybody to get on board they’re. Also in hardware. We’Re really trying to do and bring the barrier very, very low to hardware, and so this is what the Arduino module looks like it’s modeled, it’s obviously powered by Arduino, it’s Arduino brain and here programmable via the Arduino IDE.
It has three inputs and three outputs and the idea is that you snap you literally snap the magnets together and you start in two programs: I’m going to show you the city video. So, on the left side, you see a real-time circuit building on the right side. I’Ve heated up 10x now showing you how to blink an LED how to put a butter to a button to an LED and really explaining why the side this this partnership and this new product together makes sense. These are some examples of projects you can make with Arduino a little bit.
They it launches with 10 sketches available for you to make it even easier things like a chess sketch, like audio tuners in this case, an event in an animatronic hand that plays rock-paper-scissors so that you can focus on the programming and we can take care of the Hardware, we took the Arduino fair to ICP and GT to see it tested and saw suddenly the students – and I has create these beautiful art, peaceful interactions, focusing on this on the curve, what we sort of prepared in astronomy, so we launched this earlier this week on Thursday, to make it even easier to get started, we have this Arduino starter bundle, which bit was basically just a couple of weeks ago. Our head of marketing step said: how do we make it really, an immediate experience for somebody to get started in programming and in hardware, and so this bundle comes with the Arduino bit with a few different bits, dimmer LED, etc, that you can start running the sketches With you can run eight out of the 10 sketches that come with, and obviously there’s tens and hundreds and thousands more projects online that you can get inspired from. This is the etch-a-sketch project. So, on the left side and right side, you see what the materials are. It’S an Arduino to dimmers a fork and a power literally something as easy as that and suddenly you’re creating your extra sketch.
Another example is this a vintage jukebox in this case it’s a more complex circuit. I think it’s 14 bits that are needed, but the really interesting thing is you build it up, one brick at a time, without necessarily knowing how you would have done it in a breadboard setting, so we’re here at Maker Faire and we’re starting to showcase this. A suite of products that are more focused on a professional user on a hack to a hacker, a maker, and so that we’re really elevating the ceiling of things that you could do with little bits and really focusing on the word. Power and the power of electronics – and this is one of my favorite – quotes that actually a few weeks ago came out before the launch. It says seriously. This is a few weeks ago somebody talking about little bit seriously.
It’S like Legos and Arduino, made tender, love and had the most view baby little bits, but then now what I’m saying is that imagine if you take little bits plus Arduino and now it’s up to you guys to make a baby. So you can join us and go ahead and make your baby we’re at booth, six to eight and expo hall. We have the arduino bit up.
We have hackathons happening every other hour and you experience in firsthand and you can. We will win some little prizes as well. So that’s it! Thank you. .