Slashdot Mirror
Analog Approach to Displaying Data
Lurker McLurker writes "
BBC News reports that
Ambient Devices, the MIT Media Lab spin-off which brought us the
Ambient Orb, have developed a new product, the Ambient Dashboard .
The orb changed colour to display information at a glance, for example turning red if the stock market is going down. The dashboard has three displays, similar to speedometers or barometers, to show the information of your choice, from stock market volumes to the pollen count." As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.
You'll need:
Here's how you do it:
First, connect each of the rheostats to a voltmeter. Apply current and test the system to ensure that all the hardware is working properly. Then, take the USB cable and fashion one end of it into a crude snare trap. Hide this snare trap under leaves and grass clippings in the middle of your yard; hold onto the other end of USB cable and lie in wait behind a bush. When the damn kid runs across your lawn and onto the snare trap, tug hard on your end of the USB cable. This will trap the child about the ankle. Tie the free end of the USB to a securely anchored object near your comuter. Have the kid constantly surf the web, checking for information that is interesting to you; when something changes, tell him to twiddle the rheostats or something. When the novelty wears off three hours later, tell the kid to stay off your goddamn lawn from now on and let him go. Throw voltmeters and rheostats in trash. Hang self with USB cable.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
...the daily build!
Which is in the green, thanks very much.
The Army reading list
Maybe Thinkgeek should buy an ad or something.
my boss changes color to display information at a glance.
the one monitoring their web traffic just exploded.
But if you had one for everything, wouldn't you just be surrounded by a lot of (eventually) confusing colors? I still prefer a single device with a sensible display. Sure, this looks fun, but after the novelty wears off I think it'll be not only annoying but inexcusably inaccurate.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
This isn't worth much more than that. Especially not the prices they charge. I'm all about integrating information delivery into everyday hardware - especially if it looks nice. But think less B-movie prop and more toaster-with-an-mp3/aac/ogg-player. Now THAT would be useful.
Of course.. we live in an analog world.. we'll never be able to take things in digitally because we don't work digitally. Even your computer needs to be able to display in analog (speakers/monitor) before you can figure anything out. We can't do anything in digital... :)
I've got a watch that does this. Mickey's hands move with the passage of time - the big hand sweeps in a circle over the course of an hour. The little hand goes around the circle twice a day. It's great at letting me know about what time it is! Only $299, postpaid.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
So let me get this straight...
We use some type of fancy sensor to convert a real world analog signal to digital information, then we convert the digital information back to analog to humans can understand it intuitively?
The research group I work with here - Information Interfaces Research Group - at Georgia Tech works on something quite similar.
:)
:)
Its called the InfoCanvas - kinda cool stuff
And yes, although its not analog per-se (as in, display-meters and the like), it does show you in gradual gradings. Like the sky-color changing from a hue of blue to red, and the rainbow slowly fading away and the like.
Just thought it might be relevant!
Vote for a Man, Vote for Bush!
Not a liberatarian flipflop hippie.
Aren't PDA's capable of displaying all this kind of information? Of course if you are looking for that vintage 1960's look this is just the product for you
I have a digital version of this! Let's see... right now it says "Outlook not so good." Now it says, "Try again later."
Wow! High tech stuff!!!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
1- Number of support calls answered today
2- How much money earned today
3- Depressing ratio between the two
Just go to any mall. You're sure to find one.
... it would be more customizable, useful, and worthwhile if you built one of these yourself. I imagine it would not be all that difficult to attach some gauges to a computer and make it display what you want. Granted, they have done everything for you, but this really isn't all that valuable in its current state, other than as an idea I can rip off for myself.
I am feeling fat and sassy
* fires up browser *
* goes to ebay *
* Patiently waits for the burst of cheap computers and broken dreams from Ambient Devices *
i have a device commected to my computer which has ~2million indicators of colour, such a device could be used to show the state of every item on every stock market the world over, several times over
From just reading the slashdot post I thought they had come out with an Ambient Orb for your cars dashboard, with glow color dependant on your speed or rpms. ...crap, I'd better patent that before they steal it. :)
What the hell? That's a horrible idea and I want one.
Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me
I don't need a colorful orb to tell me the pollen count in my area.
My hay fever nose does just fine. Like clockwork.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
...If anything, this will merely be a fad that'll wear off after a few months. A couple of years tops. Just doesn't seem very practical. Not gonna last.
Then again, Franklin essentially said the same thing about the radio, so who am I to judge?
Thank you for your time.
No, my name does not imply the fact that I like ZZ Top. Don't bother asking.
this could actually be a useful case mod.
--
It's a single pixel monitor for crying out load!
What the hell are people thinking?
If you really want that functionality, just plug in a monitor using a second cheapo vidcard. Much more expandable...
I wonder when it'll come!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Sounds a lot like the weather ball that glowed from a tower in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. in the 60's-80's (and now back up, elsewhere in the city). Pretty intuitive, and just in case you didn't get it, there's a bit of verse to explain it: "Weather ball red, warmer weather ahead / Weather ball blue, colder weather in view / Weather ball green, no change foreseen / Color blinking bright, rain or snow in sight." Same old concept, just a different device.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
...Stock Market trends, weather forecasts, traffic on your commute...
I'm glad they invented this! I was so tired of visiting weather web sites, installing stuff in my menu bar, just to display the current temperature and barometric pressure. Now I can just plug this gizmo into my computer and have it display whether the temperature and pressure are going up or down!
I saw something like this at my grandparents' house once. I never could figure out where they got the internet subscription.
Just leave him there until he starves, then replace him with the next one who runs across your lawn. They're easily replacable, don't you see?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Can it be configured to flash bright red when GPS data shows that your wife is about to bust you with another woman?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For all my analog data display needs I devised a method of using hand held sticks made of chalk on a slate tablet.
Tablet PC's watch out, analog data displays are on the way in again!!!
I've even got a hand held version on the way!!!
Ohh and of course I've already filed over 100 patents covering my unique inventions here.
My sister-in-law got one of these for her husband for Christmas. I laughed when I first saw it, because I was convinced it was a gag: you plug it in and it randomly changes colors, "reporting" changes in the Market or whatever.
But when she told me what it cost, I figured there must be something to it. And after looking through the web site for it, I decided these must be legit. There's developer tools and everything! If they're bogus, it's one of the best scams I've seen in a long time.
But I never could figure out exactly how these work. Anyone know anything more about them?
Moments after seeing flashing red and blue lights in my rear-view window with a pound of a sticky, green, and illicit herb in my trunk, my seat turned a deep shade of brown.
The analog olfactory indicators were an added bonus.
They've invented. . . the meter?
Oh be still my heart. What will they think of next?
KFG
Hence, this will become the latest "I gotta have it!" thing for executives/bureucrats who depend on guys like us to tell them what it actually means.
Never mind me, guess I'm just cynical today. Sure, great toy.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I've got something setup on my computer which gives me analogue dials to display memory use, cpu use and CPU temperature - it's build into a box on the front of the case and runs off a little bit of code I hacked together.
;-)
Of course.... what I really want is an analogue accelerator pedal to control clock speed
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
Personally, I wouldn't buy them, as they are currently expensive and limited. However, in a few years, this could be a common interface. I especially like the idea of the weather beacon, which changes colour depending on forecasted temperatures, and pulses when precipitation is likely. I would like to have a mobile, wearable version of one of these, where I could tell what today's weather was going to be like as easily as looking at my watch.
Mod parent up!
My Griffin Technologies PowerMate has been telling me the computer load by increasing or decreasing the flash rate for over a year now.
/. news?
And this is worthy of front-page
Quintus malus puer est.
It's one of those incredibly unique things that are just a part of everyday life, and you never think of them.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
My boss has always wanted "bandwidth VU meters" to spotcheck resource usage here. Any suggestions? (Other than Google?)
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
...Brookstone, Herrington's, etc. will all carry it for about six months and then it will be go to join the Pet Rocks, in the great Johnson Smith & Co. catalog in the sky.
This is just a way of saying "I am so important and so concerned with matters of consequence that I actually need to know all this information on a minute-to-minute basis."
Remember the old Beagle Brothers software ads in Softalk? Their office had a row of clocks showing the time in, IIRC, Sausalito, Bakersfield, and San Jose... all showing the same time, of course.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's been around for a while in a number of guises; pervasive computing, transparent computing - in any case it has a name and isn't some gee-whizz brand new idea. In fact, I remember Slashdot running a story on a guy that built his own glowing flower thing (I can't find it). Even Apple have their laptop keyboards change color...
The idea of having more 'socially acceptable' ways of displaying data is pretty much the output equivalent of the invention of the mouse, joystick, whatever. Sure, it's nice that you can use analogue needle thingies, but pretty much anything that isn't a monitor or a 7-seg display will fall into this category. And in the future we'll be seeing more of them.
Why? Because it's just about finding the most relevant way to display data.
Am thinkink you are evil.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
The best Analog Approach to Displaying Data I've ever seen was taking a computers address bus and splitting it into two parts and feeding each part into a D to A converter. The output of the D to A converters was displayed on an O-Scope. You could watch where the program was running, where the OS and the application were, where data was accessed, and where the computer was spending most of it's time on a pretty simple device.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And of course, the Ambient folks would NEVER sell the huge pile of interesting demographic data that they're collecting by all these Orb users customizing their orbs.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
DuckTape can only get you so far, in this HiTech world Secretary Ridge was quoted.
Help fight continental drift.
The ones on think geek are tied to a pay as you go server. Stop paying, it stops working.
The Ambient Orb is simply plugged into any standard 110V power outlet and it is up and running on a nationwide wireless network - no internet connection required. The Orb does not attach to a PC. The channel for the Orb can be selected via a web interface and will update in a short period of time. Depending on which channel the Orb is monitoring, it will receive updates every few minutes, or perhaps once per hour for some channels.
It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices (Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500) or weather in select cities. Optionally, you can upgrade to access more premium channels, such as your customized portfolio, local weather, pollen count, or IM buddy watch. There's also a developer interface where any semi-savvy web programmer can control the color of their Orb with a simple http "get" call. Track how full your hard drive is, traffic on your website, Slashdot posts, or your credit-card debt.
1) Building national wireless network to transmit your data and not charging monthly fees.
2) Cost of bandwidth for slashdotting.
Beep beep.
Why not have the back-panels at least be LCD, so you don't have to switch out plastic panels? Seems like a pain, and limited in growth. You are going to have order new plastic panels when new information becomes available on the network?
Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome idea. Just seems a little old-fashioned changing out panels when you want to see a different set of data. They'll get lost, damaged, outdated.. etc.
It works as follows:
Some web references here blog reference and here pressrelease
You'd think that something coming out of hte media lab wouldn't have plastic tabs to change the labels -- how about LCDs or some of those new fangled flexidisplays?!
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
I would set mine to monitor the Olsen Twins countdown http://olsen.websterrf.cc/ or if you want to get really tricky, set it to monitor a solar sensor to know when it's safe to go outside (geeks burn easily)
Seems to be the trend these days..
Anyways, looks pretty cool. There's just something about analog gauges that's so asthetically pleasing. Like someone mentioned before in the post about analog watches still being used, It's probably that an analog gauge is highly visual, whereas digital is more of numeric processing. Would anyone rather have a digital tach in their car than an analog one? I know I wouldn't.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
but this kind of products seem really stupid, and building a business around it, well...
I mean, besides the novelty of it, is it something that really serves a purpose? Or is it just one more of those kind of executive desk toys?
But if they insist, then perhaps what they SHOULD do is consult Edward Tufte and create entire lines of products for displaying statistical/quantitative information in a way that would be truly meaningful and useful.
The Orb, if I recall right, uses a proprietary radio network to receive information. It seems to me like they would have a broader market and a cheaper device if it could make use of WiFi or Ethernet and just sell access to a Web Service that provides the same info. As it is, I wouldn't buy it since there are limitations on how I can extend it because of their design choices.
I do like the concept though.
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.
sheesh taco, you're pre-emptively killing the sale for thinkgeek.
It is *amazingly* accurate.
Click Here for more details on how to use analog ambient weather displays.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
System load could be signified by clicks, with the frequency of the clicks increasing as system load increases.
Each new TCP connection would make some kind of "boing" sound, with the frequency again depending on what service I'm connecting to (http would go boioioioing, ssh would go beeeerooooing, etc)
Memory usage would be signified by a double-beep, "beeee-beep," with the "duty cycle" indicating the percentage of memory usage. Two short beeps means lots of memory is free. One long "beeeep" means I'm swapping to disk.
Disk seek activity would be a series of random bleeping sounds, like Brownian motion across frequencies.
Basically, I would like an irritating cacophony of sound to emanate from my workstation, which only I can interpret :-)
It says something about using a national wireless network and their coverage map looks like cell-phone coverage maps. Does anyone have any idea what it actually uses and how it knows your orb is yours to display the stock or whatever you want it to?
Your loudspeakers' cones move continuously (after all, they are analog devices). To do otherwise would imply that they can instantly move from one position to another - and disclaimers aside, I think that we all know what that would mean!
(My pendantism aside, your post was kind of funny)
-h-
Didn't Apple patent this?
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
- Red = Warmer
- White = Colder
- Green = No Change
- Blinking = Precipitation coming
It was simple, but it worked.A history of the Weatherball
I haven't been by that area for years, so I don't know if the Weatherballs are still there or not. Bueller?
Ambient has a very informative FAQ on their site. It answers pressing questions such as
"Does this device emit radiation"
and when the answer contains "all things emit radiaion", you know the author must have went to MIT.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's listed as the Ambient EXECTUTIVE Dashboard. Executive - no need to be sensible or accurate.
The previous color changing ones were a little too simple and tended to hypnotize the executives. Have you seen the Executive toys at most office stores? I don't think Novelty wears off for those folks.
Actually the brains treat signal in an aproximate digital way. Neurpons fire in a digital way. Once a certain threshold signal (action potential) is reached they fire a pulse.
And besides from what I can understand of quantum theory there is actually a minimum distance one can move at a time. Things move instantly from one point to another. This distance is insanely small though.
I know nothing about tcp/ip, but my electronics and basic are pretty good...
You'll need
3 analog dials
3 triacs
a parrelel port.
i'll just provide a link with some pertanent info. Basically wire up the triacs to the voltmeters (to isolate and backflow current from the VU meter's coils) and the other end to any data line on the parrellel port. Strobe the data line till your VU meters needle is pointing where you want it to go.
Some soccer mom in her big ass SUV, talking on her cell phone while putting on makeup and useing one foot to steer and the other to engage in Day Trading while she watches her dashboard to find out hwo her stocks are doing and to decide whether or not life is worth living.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
If they only made a device that was displayed current information of my choosing, supported multiple colors, was able to display text, could be viewed from a distance, was low cost and could be seen at eye level when I was in front of the computer...That would be a winner.
The Orb is just a new incarnation of the old "Stock Market Skirt" which you can see at http://www.vacuumwoman.com/MediaWorks/Stock/stock. html and some background at http://www.judymalloy.net/newmedia/nancy.html
This has been around since at least 1995.
Marc
5: How does the Ambient Device get information?
Via a nationwide wireless network called the Ambient Information Network. It works in a similar way to cell phones and receivers.
Translation:
There's a pager receiver inside. We send out national pages every few minutes which essentially contain packets of information on each of the possible displays.
It's still an innovative use of a nearly obsolete network. However, they can't gurantee free service for life though. When they go out of business, your nifty device is nothing unless you hack a computer interface into it, or get a pager account and find a way to attach the receiver into that account.
But it makes me smile to hear them say they have a network all for themselves - giving the impression that they own or control the network their messages are sent over.
-Adam
Actually, what with me not being a rocket scientist and all, the distance isn't as small as I would have assumed.
Never confuse volume with power.
His post was kind of accurate. When you look at the quantumn level, everything is digital. That "continuous" movement on that "analog" speaker cone is really a bunch of discrete quantumm jumps too small for you to notice.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
... every colourblind person would want one!
is that because executives are too stupid to process real data and like things boiled down to meaningless colors ?! Seems much like the power point to management level ratio. I can literally gauge the management level of a presentation based on the number of colors and type of power point (ie moron displays) The prettier the page, the higher up the management... If presented it in flow charts with lots of colors I could sell our management on anything. Use a digital projector and put it in 3d and you can add 5 million to the budget of any project :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Then again, all you need to do is write software that will display a single color in fullscreen mode reacting to the information you want it to.
It's doable in three lines of VB.
I have a digital version of this! Let's see... right now it says "Outlook not so good." Now it says, "Try again later."
Ask it about Exchange Server next...
--
what? huh?
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
see http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm
h .htm
This seems similar to Calm Technology research done at Xerox PARC. The research was/is about "engaging both the center and the periphery of our attention and moving back and forth between the two. Ordinarily when driving our attention is centered on the road, the radio, our passenger, but not the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we were attuned to the noise in the periphery, and could come quickly to attend to it."
They designed a Dangling String to "visualise" network traffic:
"Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the "Dangling String".
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology."
from Designing Calm Technology by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995
http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtec
Sorry, I'm just reminiscing about the old days when I had a micro with some of the address lines insufficiently isolated from the speaker so I could actually hear how busy the CPU was. Just a low level hum but enough to signal when your code was caught in a loop and far more informative that a CPU meter because in a crude way you could actually hear the structure of the kinds of loops being executed. Maybe I should write something like this myself but I'm not sure how to poll the state of the PC register, say, under any modern OS. Each process could have a sound channel - proportional in volume to the CPU time it's using - and I'd be instantly alerted any time something weird was going on.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
You forgot step 6: Profit!
You don't even need to think too hard, since Ambient actually tells you how, to build your own, on their developer page. They are probably guessing that most people would rather spend their money on a solution that doesn't require a soldering iron, so they don't mind sharing the details.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A bottle of beer!
If there's a chilled out eveing imminent there's a bottle of beer on the table. What's really cool is that its beer coloured. With so many colours of beer available, I never get tired of it.
If I'm warm inside and feeling better the bottle is empty. An empty bottle is a really good indicator that I need to visit the cupboard and get another one.
If theres no bottle of beer, its probably going to be a long dry evening.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
This is perfect for helping me keep track of Ashcroft's current terrorism alert level!!!
See lavaps
for an example applying this concept to track processes (CPU consumption and memory usage) on a Unix system.
Of course, 8 years ago when Mark Weiser did this, he called it "calm" technology.
I know nothing about tcp/ip, but my electronics and basic are pretty good...
I know nothing about electronics or class, but my tcp/ip is pretty good --
but my own link is the best way to sum up how I wasted my Christmas bonus. After dropping wish.sourceforge.net and a fig newton firecracker x10 adapter, I can safely say my analog solution to digital alerts is as wasteful as I could muster this winter.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Which would indicate that these 'analog displays' that the story is about aren't really analog at all.
The other option is that the speakers are analog in the same way that the Ambient meters are analog.
Are we getting into semantics here?
Comment heard from PHB to IT: I need you to supply me with one of these because I can't do my job without it!!
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
I've had one of these sort of things for years.
It's a porn-o-meter. It tells me how good the porn is I happen to be looking at at any given time.
It's in my pants.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
Take what I said with the same grain of pedanticness (if that's a word) that I took when I said it. The motion is continuous.
-h-
Yeah, I see these things eventually ending up in the same box of junk as the NewsCatcher I bought back in 1996 or 1997. For those of you who don't remember, these were a flash-in-the-pan whiz-bang pyramid-shaped device that plugged into a free serial port and received little news bits over a nationwide pager network. The software would then pop up little news items from time to time so you could feel like you were plugged into the pulse of the world. For some reason I was obsessed with owning one of these back then and spent $99 on one. What the hell was I thinking?
Anybody remember that funny info pyramid thing from about 1995 or so? It also received data over a pager network and conected to your PC via a serial port. I had one, but the reception always sucked, and the info was usually mediocre at best.
-This sig intentionally left blank
No, but if you get your wife to use an on-line menstrual calendar, you can have the Orb match it. It'd be your own personal color-coded terror alert level system.
I understand what you're trying to say, but the "discrete quantum jumps" that you're talking about are related to the Uncertainty Principle, and it's important to remember that that applies to what we can (potentially) measure, not what can actually be. And if we're talking about discrete motion at that level, the whole idea of a speaker cone moving as a uniform body simply doesn't apply. You can't mix Newtonian and quantum physics.
And since "pedantic" seems to be my favorite word of the day, since I'm being pedantic, you have to be too
-h-
I built an analog remote control computer display meter in April 2001 and demonstrated it publicly: here.
The file date on the oldest version of the index.html.old file is April 21, 2001.
How would they sell this past ADA (American With Disabilities Act)? You can not code something ONLY with color.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I bet you could use these to assess terrorist threat levels! There would be a different color depending on how likely it is to be attacked by a terrorist!!
Oh wait...
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
One thing I'm doing on Musicmobs is highlighting artist names in a big block of text when the artist matches one that you listen to (if you are logged in). The effect is, that when you look at someone's page you can pretty much tell right away if they listen to the same music as you.
You can also get a quick idea of how similar their taste is by the position of the color in the block. It's a good way to display multiple pieces of relevant information in the same spot when you are tight on gui real estate.
Get some analog voltmeters. Get an I2C DAC chip, eg. a TDA8444 (which is a set of 8 6-bit DACs). Connect the SCL and SDA lines to the serial (after voltage-limiting to TTL levels, eg. with resistor and a Zener diode) or parallel port. Send output voltages of the DACs by bit-banging the I2C lines. Optionally put output drivers on the outputs, if the voltmeters eat too much, or if you want to drive eg. banks of red, green, and blue LEDs. You can stack several TDA8444s together on the same bus, and drive not only the voltmeters, but also the LEDs that backlight them, so the dial can show the actual stock market value, while the backlight hue is red for fall, green for rise, and yellow for stagnant. Or you can just switch the LEDs on-off, and use a suitable I2C-to-8bit expander.
With a microcontroller and eg. a Radiotronix Wi.232 wireless module you can even have it wirelessly connected to the computer that feeds it with the data.
If you want to be really Ambient, you may improvise the swappable faceplates with some kind of encoding what ones are placed on (which may be as simple as a set of microswitches against pins or holes in the back of the faceplates, with the number of the plate BCD-encoded; many other options possible).
The correct link to the developer pages is http://www.ambientdevices.com/developer/
Please know that I enjoy reading Slashdot comments and I feel richer for my time spent in this "community". However, I have to say that the reactions in this thread seem like a typical Slashdot response to anything that:
a) Makes technology more accessible
b) is elegantly designed
AND
c) costs more than fifty cents
While it's true that these are costly toys who's functions could be duplicated with a computer, a monitor, and a WiFi connection, that misses the point. The technology here is not revolutionary, but the idea is interesting and hints at an entire area of Internet applications that is still in its infancy.
The value of information is largely dependent on it's context and it's accessibility. As the Internet slowly but surely insinuates itself into all facets of our lives, I predict that these simple, yet elegant, gadgets are only the first glimmerings of the Internet's "Flesh Made Real".
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Fold in the fact that a "model" (whether of the stock market, a social situation, or a scientific simulation) does nothing more than capture that small part of reality we're interested in, and finding "meaning" becomes even more difficult.
And on top of that, add that one person's garbage is another person's data ... and vice versa.
This company's solution isn't my cup of tea, but at least they are trying to address the problem.
My development group at Shopping.com uses an Ambient Orb to reflect the status of the hourly build/test cycle. Even though the continuous build process sends out email and has a web page to indicate what the status is, it's still nice to have a physical artifact of the system, and certainly hammers home that The Build Must Keep Working. When you look at it and it's green, you feel just a little bit OK, and when it's red, you get a little anxious, and really want to make sure it gets fixed.
I only wish that the Orb was more responsive to the data we send it; occasionally it can take 20 minutes for it to update. But overall, we like it. Do not anger the Orb!
mahlen
Doesn't someone sell a $40 LCD display that just shows data set across a USB cable? Maybe just a dome with a circular band of LEDs, with a marquee? Then the SW can set the display data, like sending the digits for the current time every minute.
--
make install -not war
Once on a trip to New York City with my old girlfriend, she said "Oh, no, it's going to rain tomorrow."
Since it was a perfectly clear day, I asked her why she thought so. She pointed up to a big red umbrella symbol on the side of a building.
"Um, no... that's the Travelers Life Insurance building..."
When I moved to Japan, I saw a lot of the umbrella mark as a weather forecast display and understood her confusion...
-- My Weblog.
We have a similar thing in Toronto - although I'm not sure if it has a name. It's a rectangular lantern-ish thing on top of a spire on the old Canada Life (I think) building, just north of Queen street at University. It's either red or green, and flashes in various patterns which altert the savvy viewer to the weather.
Except that no one I've ever met knows how to interpret it. Any ideas?
Cue The Sun...
thread.sensible != true
> but my own link is the best way to sum up how I wasted my Christmas bonus.
Must be a little bonus just for a small brass lantern...
..Believe me...I should know.
Anyway, Color-reactivity has been around for ages. Even within the scope of involving computers in one form or another.. There are two examples that i'm aware of, both were implemented w/ early 60's technology:
1) I wish I could remember the name. It was basically a computer-controlled art exhibit. They set aside a room in an art gallery with an old IBM 704, rigged the room up with motion sensors and microphones, and used the input levels to drive color wheels and light projectors... So if the gallery was quiet, the walls and all the stuff hanging from the ceiling would turn deep blue and move slowly. If there were alot of people visiting the gallery, the color of the room would turn more pink and yellow. If there was alot of chatter going on inside the gallery, with people talking to eachother, the more psychedelic the room became.
2) There used to be a device back in the early-mid 60's called an Audiovox, if i'm not mistaken...The Audiovox was just a simple amplifier with three colored lights on the front.... Red, Yellow,and Green. It was used to help deaf children learn how to modulate their speech, based upon the feedback the lights produced.... If the lights flickered red, the user would know that their pronunciation was way off. By trying to make (and keep) the green light as solid as possible, deaf children could refine their speech without necessarrily knowing what it sounded like. Neat stuff..
Anyway. Not a new idea. Not even when I had written about it.
Bowie J. Poag
A speaker cone, and its effect on the air pressure, is not quantized, but rather analogue plus random, the random components coming from amplifier noise and Brownian motion of the air it is driving.
The movement of hairs in the ear is also mostly analogue. Older Slashdotters may remember analogue frequency meters, which had an array of tuned reeds covering a fairly narrow band around the power frerquency of 50, 60 or 400Hz, and by looking at the white painted ends you could see a crude spectrum display. The reeds might be tuned in steps of 0.25 Hz, but the eye would pick out the curve and interpolate its peak to less than that. The ear mechanism is similar, there are many overlapping tuned filters, but the amplitude detection is at least semi-analogue.
The real world only becomes digital when you get down to doing things like counting photons, for example in astronomy using an image intensifier in front of a CCD, but even there the distribution in both time and frequency/energy of these photons is thermodynamic or if you prefer, statistical.
Many digital designs fail or are troublesome because the whizz-kids who think they know VHDL and can drive a toolset, forget about ANALOGUE things like transmission line effects on the PCB, or statistical things like timing jitter, which is ultimately caused by amplitude noise, a statistical thing, being summed with a signal of finite slew rate.
It is DIGITAL systems which are unable to make a sufficiently exact representation of the real world, for example 16 bit encoding is woefully inadequate for high quality audio.
Energy also comes in any quantity we like, the physical velocity of hot gas, for example, contains a random element, but because of partial ionisation its summation is not limited to the sum of permissible quantum states of individual atoms, which of course would be quantised.
So, it is a noisy analogue world, and digits superimposed thereon are simply discrete groups of noisy analogue levels. If you don't believe that statement, look at a PCI bus on a good analogue oscilloscope!
If you want to see something else which in theory should be digital, and therefore precise, exact and consistent, look at the trash software products of the Convicted Monopolist. Here the statistical component is indirect, caused by numerous semi-random human contributions at the design and coding stages, and a large degree of something which is neither analogue nor digital, nor even statistical, neither is it a variable (because its purpose is truly deterministic/monoploistic), nor a constant (because it produces output which is truly random insofar as it is totally uncorrelated with anything else), but is in fact the product of pure greed (a quasi-digital quantity, usually approximate by 1), pure arrogance(a dimensionless variable approaching infinity) and total incompetence (a dimensionless variable approaching zero). I will call this new property of matter Billness.
the top of the gulf bldg used 2 light up in colors according 2 the weather...dunno how long ago or if it's still...
Ambient is another company just like Color Kinetics that is using their MIT pedigree to make their simple technology seem a lot cooler than it actually is, and charge accordingly. Ambient puts hobbyist-class devices in IDEO-class packages and calls them "revolutionary" products, while Color Kinetics attempts to convince us that mixing RGB LEDs using pulse-width modulation is somehow worthy of a patent (their patents actually cover a theater lighting networking protocol). If only I had a Brass Rat on my ring finger, perhaps I could sell you a nifty color-changing doohickey for hundreds of dollars!
I use a clown-nose with a red bulb in it to signal the status of SCO stock.
heh.
the traffic light was actually only 85 bucks including shipping. i spent the rest driving home from the company party!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Here is a good step by step showing how to make your own. Very cool.