Being a first time dad has been the most amazing experience of my life. Watching my daughter grow, and witnessing her constant exploration of the world around her has been extraordinary. Unfortunately when Mondays roll around, it is time for me and many other parents to drop off our kids at the babysitter.  The amount of time we get to interact with each other is very minimal, and pretty sad.

In a world where we all feel so “connected”, the people that matter most have no method of remotely interacting with us.  My 1 1/2 year has no twitter, or Facebook account to update.  She doesn’t check into fourSquare every time we go to grandma’s house. Even with mobile phones and Skype video conferencing, there is no direct method of me interacting with her without the assistance and supervision of an adult. So basically, we could only interact with each other when another adult has both the time and is willing to put in the effort to set up an environment for us to communicate.

This got me thinking “how can my daughter and I interact during my work hours?”  The first thing I did was identify the main characteristics of my daughter, back when I first started working on this project:

• My daughter was one year old.
• Her vocal communication ability was in the preliminary stages of development
• Her motor skills where still not fully developed, so complex tasks like using a keyboard or mouse where not possible.
• She needs adult assistance to use our everyday communication tools that available to us (moble and land-line phones, computers, etc).

At this young age, children are extremely dependent on their parents and other adults for just about everything.  However, there are also several activities that come as naturally as breathing and eating to a child. Two of those activities that i observed where exploration and play, many times triggered by a common catalyst of curiosity.

Children gradually explore their environment and toys and interacted with them, mastering the new skills that they learn along the way. Quickly they are able to identify all sorts of toy input locations which triggered various types of output, such as audio and visual feedback.
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I working on a project, I was faced with a challenge of creating a serial bus via multiple Arduino which could communicate with each other. My first intuition, after a little push in the right direction by Tom Igoe, was to create a Master/Slave setup where a Master micro-controller polls all the slave micro-controllers, and dispatches an action. Although this answered one of my question, polling didn’t allow for complete 2-way communication. It tuned out that the answer was mainly an oversight of my interpretation of the Wire documentation.

From Arduino Site:

Wire.begin()
Wire.begin(address)
====
Description
Initiate the Wire library and join the I2C bus as a master or slave.
====
Parameters
address: the 7-bit slave address (optional); if not specified, join the bus as a master.
====
Returns
none

I interpreted this explanation as Wire.begin(SomeAddress) would default as a slave, and not be allowed to be a Master. Being as curious, and stubborn as I typically am, i decided to forget what I thought I was being told, and instead try to break the library, so I could then see where it broke, and attempt to adjust it in a way that better suited my need. Surprise, surprise, it worked, and not need to change anything at all! The address parameter is optional and defaults as a master role if no address is set. However if you do plan on sending messages to the master, you could switch speaker and listener roles via a slaves Wire.onReceive(handler) rather then polling using onRequest(handler). Read more

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I have always had a fascination with trying to understand how the things around me work. It just so happens that after having a child, most of the thing around me are toys. Large toys, small toy, blinking lights, sounds, singing, haptics, interactivity, it is all pretty darn amazing when you sit back and really look at how much technology my little one year old daughter navigates and interacts with during play. Many time when we think of children and technology we automatically think of desktop computers and video game consoles. Although all of these are examples of technology the only interaction my daughter has with them is me telling her, “don’t touch”, and handing her a toy to distract her attention.

I decided to take a trip to my daughter’s toy collection to examine some of the sensing capabilities that her electronic toys offer. I will specifically focus on the toys input capabilities:

(At the end of the post there is a video of me trying to figure out how the LeapFrog Tag Jr works. Let me know your thoughts.)

Fisher-Price Elmo Live Encore

This is by far one my daughters favorite toys. The toy is modeled after Elmo, a Sesame Street character, which most children a quickly drawn to by his bright red color, large eyes, and youthfully fun voice.

Inputs

• Push Buttons: Typically buttons on toys are visually obvious, however Fisher Price decided to create an exploratory interaction by spreading out four button throughout the plush doll. Three of the buttons are hidden under the fabric, on the toe, chest, and back, and the final button switch is closed by squeezing his nose.
• Tilt Sensor: One of the nice additions that the creators added to the toy was integration of a Tilt Sensor. When Elmo falls on his side, he politely ask for help to stand backup, which is sometime accompanied with a joke.

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So i finally had time to tinker around with this Simon Sez project again. Turns out there wasn’t an issue after all with my circuits, it was an issue in my code. I also did some house keeping on the code, and created a nice little diagram using Fritzing, an awesome app that was recommend to our class Read more

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