Spark Devices, a startup that’s part of the HAXLR8R incubator in China, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for its Spark Core hardware and cloud service that advertises the first two ideas, but CEO and Co-founder Zach Supalla hopes that the last example is where the market eventually ends up. The company’s Kickstarter is already funded after a mere 75 minutes (the goal was a relatively low $10,000), but the hardware isn’t the really exciting offering here.

Essentially the hardware is an Arduino with the nicest Texas Instruments Wi-Fi shield attached. A shield is what people add to their Arduino boards for extra functionality. They come in all kinds ranging from LCD screen to Wi-Fi. But the point is that anyone can make this: The real value is, as Supalla said, in the software.

In a chat this afternoon Supalla explained that the company’s four employees have been coming up with the Spark Core idea and platform since its first Kickstarter project (and business idea) failed. They had offered a connected light bulb called Spark Socket just a few weeks after the Philips Hue and the LIFX light bulb came out, and apparently the market for connected lightbulbs was subsequently saturated.

Supalla didn’t let that slow him down. Like several other companies he recognized that while there are hundreds of thousands of makers out there willing to play around with connected devices, there were literally millions of people who would love to have the same kind of toys that DIYers hack together in a more polished form.

But the price of delivering that polished form was too high for Spark Devices; plus, there’s more value in software as open hardware becomes more tenable for businesses building consumer-grade hardware outside of DIYers. So Spark really wants to make the same play that Electric Imp is attempting, offering connectivity in an easy-to-integrate package with the primary value being a cloud-based platform for hosting and writing the code to build services associated with those connected devices.

In short, it’s another platform as a service for the internet of things. Thus, with the hardware components it is most like Electric Imp, but on the software side it competes with a bunch of companies such as Carriots, ThingWorx and likely many more.

So for those of you excited about pulling together a Wi-Fi powered RC car or a connected web cam, this project and hardware is for you. But to build a big business Spark Devices is going to have to entice more than makers.

The good news is the team knows this, and has a small amount of seed funding to get it started. Let’s see what happens.

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The details on the new BeagleBone board are here, but basically TI is offering a 1 GHz ARM processor plus the connectivity and power components on a single board for $45. That’s a lot of compute power for a little price. While the Raspberry Pi costs $35 it doesn’t have as many ports built in, and Adrian Valenzuel, marketing director of TI’s Sitara ARM processor product line, said it also isn’t as open.

When pressed, he said that people who build with the Pi can’t buy the hardware that comprises the Pi board on the open market, unlike with the TI board. He’s right. The chip on the Pi is built by Broadcom, but it’s not something that anyone can simply order and play with. On the flip side, Atmel, the company that makes the processors on the Arduino boards, sells those components and has released software supporting the Arduino community.

And while some people might be content to play with $35 Pis, there are plenty of people thinking about pro-quality projects that might want to get even more granular than the board, and try their hand at tweaking the components around the processor. That’s TI’s sales pitch as it moves down market to the class of makers who love the power of the Pi over the ubiquitous (in Maker circles, anyway) Arduino.

TI’s hope is that by getting people playing with its board it can sell components and attract a user base that wants to play with its hardware. It may never be a huge business, but it’s one that chip makers are paying attention to. Earlier this year AMD introduced its GizmoSphere board, a $200 board and developer community for makers.

While none of the companies involved are willing to share any sense of how these products may help them financially, it’s clear that chip firms are eying the maker community as a market worth paying attention to, especially as the internet of things heats up.

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Two of the company’s engineers created a way to control a lawn irrigation system using a number of technologies, including Android, Ardiuno, Python, Dart and Google App Engine. J.J Barrons and Joe Fernandez demo their custom solution in this brief video, showing the simple Android app that’s used to control the system, along with the hardware required to make it all work.

The two took things a step further with a web-based, fun interface to sprinkle the lawn; that’s the part that uses Python, Dart and Google App Engine. Best of all: If you have the inclination to put a similar “Irrduino” system together yourself, the two engineers are sharing the source code at the aptly-named web address of http://bit.ly/waterjoeslawn.

As impressed as I am by the project, I’d love to see the Googlers take it one step further. Perhaps my first addition would be a tie-in to the local weather that automatically disables the sprinkler system in the event of rain or other precipitation.

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The Facebook blog post is here, and details all the hacks, which make for fun reading. But what I thought was especially worthwhile was that in at least two cases the hacks resulted in a real product that was later rolled out to users, such as the new full screen photo view or the improved events calendar. Others like putting hot servers in mineral oil to dissipate heat or building a light-up dash board using an Arduino board and a connection to Facebook’s spam monitoring service are already in use elsewhere, but could still benefit the company down the line.

Facebook’s map of where football fans live.

I don’t know what percent of Facebook’s hack projects result in real-world improvements to its product or to the backend infrastructure, but in this batch four out of the top eight fell into that category, which seems to indicate that the hacker way Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg preaches is still in effect. And I especially liked how three of the projects dealt with data visualization, with two of those taking the visualizations into the real world: one by printing a 3-D globe that showed Facebook usage in the world using three different topographical details and the aforementioned light-up message board for visualizing spam alerts.

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Here are some of the suggestions from Emile Patrone, the founder of DIY project sales site Tindie, Scott Miller, the founder of product design consulting firm Dragon Innovation, and William Hurley, the co-founder of design firm Chaotic Moon Studios. And yes, all of them recommended some sort of 3D printer, either the Form-1 that began as a Kickstarter campaign and will sell for $3,299 in April, or the MakerBot Replicator for $2,199 (because of Hurricane Sandy it looks like that won’t arrive in time for the holidays though). But like a soldering iron, I’m going to assume if your hacker recipient wants a 3D printer they already have one.

Product: Simon Says
Cost: $12.95
What you need to know: The Simon Says board is a beginner board kit that plays a light and sound-based memory game. The board plays a series of sounds and you play it back in sequence. The kit aims to teach people how to solder, and is also uses open source hardware so you can program your own light and sound combinations after you’ve maxed out the ones already programmed on the board.

Product: The Rascal
Cost: $175
What you need to know: This is a somewhat hard-to-buy gift, since they are batch-made, but the boards are basically portable (if you include a Wi-Fi radio and a battery) web servers that you can program using Python. People have used them to control any electronic device from the web. You can hook your electronic device into the board (you will probably need a shield of some sorts) and then write some code to build a web site from which you can now control the device. With the right board and shield I may be able to figure out how to control my oven from the web (yes, this is a dream of mine).

Product: Stirling Engine Model
Cost: $129
What you need to know: The product description says this is beautiful as well as a lesson in thermodynamics, and who wouldn’t want a desk-side sculpture that also doubles as a physics experiment? Plus you have to make it! As paperweights go the replica of a Stirling Engine, (there’s one inside a Segway) shows you how to convert an external heat source into motion via a fan, car and generator experiment. Outrage your steampunk friends with a more alternative engine.

Product: Electric Imp Breakout
Cost: $19.95
What you need to know: The Electric Imp guys have the ambitious goal of bringing Wi-Fi to everything using an SD-style card that you can plug into a variety of gadgets, appliances or even lamps. then you program those elements via a web-based service. You can’t get the easy-to-use version of the products yet, but you can buy a breakout board and build your own connected product if you’re so inclined.

Product: ExtraCore
Cost: $10.50
What you need to know: A lot of people buy Arduino boards and share them between projects. This makes sense because those boards containing the logic processors can be expensive. The downside is that you may have a lot of half-complete projects waiting around for a board to make it work. ExtraCore is a kit that can power your project for a third of the cost of an Arduino board. The key to this board is that it’s small and Looks just like Arduino Uno to the integrated developer environment.

Product: Twine
Cost: $99
What you need to know: Connecting stuff to the Internet is pretty much an essential step in many DIY projects, and Twine makes is easy enough that I can do it. The product is a rubberized self-contained sensor pack that also has a Wi-Fi radio that outputs to a web site. The Twine web app reflects what the sensors see in real time, so you can than write a little program telling Twine that when X happens it should take an action that might send info to a web page, to an email, to Twitter or to the Pebble Smart watch.

Product: The 2WD Rovera Arduino Robot Kit
Cost: $174.99
What you need to know: Who doesn’t want to build a friendly little robot to play with and/or help you in your plans for world domination. The kit includes everything you need to build a two-wheeled robot including the motor shield board, wheels and wires. It’s unclear if you can add a sensor that would allow you to program the robot to look soulfully at you and say, “No disassemble.”

Product: MiniStylophone Kit
Cost: $9:50
What you need to know: This is a kit for beginners that will allow them to play music and record sounds for later playback. The kit requires the recipient to solder 24 resistors to the board, so make sure your recipient has a soldering iron. When done you use a stylus to play the music on the stylophone. You can hook it into other projects or annoy your friends and parents.

Product: Membership to a hack space
Cost: It varies, but can range from $99 to $175 per month.
What you need to know: There are myriad places where like-minded DIYers can get together and take classes, use equipment and store their projects from the Artisan’s Asylum in Boston to TechShop which has spaces in the Bay Area, Austin, Detroit and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. For a listing of other popular places check out the Hackerspaces Wiki.

Product: Gamby
Cost: $25
What you need to know: This is a limited edition Arduino shield to combine with an Arduino board to make a mobile gaming console. It has a monochrome LCD screen and four-way directional pad for that up-up-down-down gameplay. The games are already in your head, so get coding and start playing them on your very own hardware. Great gift for a special proposal or an awesome product to make with your kids.

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And you’d be right. Holograms? Check. 3D printing? Check. Robots? Triple check — even a DragonBot.

I toured the lab this week. Here is a quick look at some of the coolest stuff on display…

1. Artisanal technology

Students at MIT’s High-Low Tech group pair old-world materials and processes with new-wave technology. They paint circuitry on paper, or stitch it onto cloth. In the dandelion print (below), the art overlays circuitry that provides interactivity. Blow on the dandelion seed pod, and guess what happens…

2. DIY and BYO objects

With the advent of open-source software and, more recently, open-source hardware, young designers have the tools to build lots of great stuff – at relatively low costs. Kickstarter efforts and open-source-like projects like Arduino blazed the trail here.

BYO cell phones?

That has sparked a big return to home-built gadgets — even cell phones – said Media Lab director Joi Ito. In the agrarian era, people made and grew what they needed before shifting to a mass-production/mass-consumption model. Now the pendulum may be swinging back. (Ito even hinted that the Lab might extend to deal with grow-your-own projects.)

3. Better, more realistic displays

3-D image of Joi Ito.

We’re not at the Princess Leia hologram stage yet, but we’re getting there.  Dan Novy, a research assistant at the Lab’s Object-Based Media group,  showed off a couple of cool display technologies, including a 3D projection of Ito seated in a chair.

A future iteration will let that image retain its 3D quality as viewers take different angles. And there’s an immersive video experience that really pulls you into what you’re watching, provided you view it at the right distance and angle.

4. Augmented reality

What if you wore a ring that could summon up additional information about anything you pointed it at?

That’s what the EyeRing project proposes. A prototype ring, aka a “finger-worn executive assistant”, can read price tags or signs to blind people. Or it can give tourists additional information about their surroundings without forcing them to look down at a smart phone or tablet.

MIT’s Roy Shilkrot wearing EyeRing.

5. 3D printed buildings

3D printing technology is a favorite topic at GigaOM. A group at MIT is building technology could enable the “print out” of a house in a day or two, according to research assistant Steven Keating. The process prints out molds made of plastic or composite which are then filled with concrete for assembly into a building.

3D printing.

One final thing…

Oh, and don’t forget DragonBot, the Android-phone-controlled social robot. I didn’t get to see him, but there’s no reason you should miss out: Check him (it) out in the video below:

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So for $25 anyone can work on a project that uses computers at its heart, and if something breaks, they can just go buy a new one. This makes small Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards the hardware DIYers’ new LEGO bricks. 

Last month, tens of thousands of makers from around the world came together at Maker Faire. Kids were begging their parents to help them build RC planes, buy them kits with Arduino boards and learning how to solder.

Will the DIY movement produce the next Apple?

Many of the kits these kids were using weren’t made by billion dollar corporations – they were made by cottage industry electronics businesses, hobbyists, and “fantrepreneurs.” Yes, as Chris Anderson says in his new book “Makers”, we are at the start of a hardware revolution – led from the ground up, in your home.

We have come full circle – back to April 1, 1976 when Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started selling the Apple 1 computer kit.

 Today’s kit owes its creation to the Arduino project which pioneered this space. The Arduino board is a small, basic, almost disposable piece of hardware that integrated with a simple development environment. Originally intended for university-student projects, it quickly exploded into mainstream DIY culture – today Radioshack even stocks them.

Raspberry Pi on the other hand is a full Linux computer for basically the same price. And as such it has a vast library of existing building blocks that hackers can call upon. 

Raspberry Pi’s original stated goal is to help kids learn how to program on a computer without fear of breaking it. But at $25 dollars its allure is irresistible to hackers and inventors –  people have been using them for a wider range of ideas – like building a supercomputer out of LEGOs.

Raspberry Pi only went on sale in February, and has also sold hundreds of thousands since then.  Here are a few examples of the explosion of projects the Pi is enabling:

• An open source disaster relief drone;
• A Quadcopter Raspberry Pi;

• A voice controlled robot; and
• An XBMC Media Center for managing streaming media.

The rise of these Arduino and Rasbperry Pi projects is a symptom of a larger change. Because of the many niches, cost of production, and speed of innovation, it isn’t the big companies that make these kits and parts.  It is small one-person hardware companies and hobbyists around the world. 

A few examples are:

• Jason Huggins in Chicago, who makes the Robot that plays Angry Birds;
• 
LogicalZero in Boston which makes GAMBY, an Arduino Retro Gaming Shield; and
• Electronic Laboratory in the UK, which makes MiniStylophone Kits.



The result of this movement will be the innovation that our kids build on top of it. At the Maker Faire, while I waited in line for a hotdog, I overheard two banker types behind me. 

“It is amazing how many people are here,” one said. The other countered with, “What’s great is seeing all of the kids.”

As the internet was for my generation, hardware is for the current generation. The Maker movement proves this, and every day more and more small business pop up selling the kits, parts, and gadgets to support them. I may be a bit biased as I run tindie, a marketplace for people to buy and sell homemade technology, but the success of Arduino & Raspberry Pi only reinforce my bet on the maker trend.

Recently Jay Goldberg wrote, that “hardware is dead” – arguing that the drop in hardware prices is killing margins for the large producers to the point where is impossible to make revenue off commodity technology. It is true – prices are falling quicker than the large companies can innovate. However that price drop has opened an entirely new marketplace for smaller companies to emerge. Hardware isn’t dead – it’s moving back into garages where it started.

Emile Petrone is the CEO of Tindie, a site that sells hardware kits.

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SmartThings is trying to raise $250,000, and it just got a boost in the form of a tweet from Kevin Rose, the co-founder of Digg and now at Google Ventures, that has helped it raise $60,000 in just a few hours since its launch. SmartThings has an app environment, a SmartHub that connects and houses the intelligence for the sensors and will develop sensor kits. One plugs into a wall outlet and will then turn things on or off when a certain online is taken (every time you get a new Twitter follower your lights blink on and off).

Other kits include a presence sensor (is your hamster still in his cage?), a motion sensor (the hamster must have run into the upstairs bedroom) and an open/shut sensor for doors, windows or cabinets (quick that bedroom window is open, don’t let Fluffy escape). The plan right now, according to the Kickstarter page for SmartThings, is to use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-wave, Zigbee (and maybe cellular) for connectivity. So if Fluffy leaves your yard, he may be lost if SmartThings can’t work a deal with a carrier.

SmartThings promises more sensors and kits, and as you can see the system is designed as both a home automation-style system where you use your connected devices to control physical elements, but also as a link between the real and online world, where actions taken online can have a physical impact. Another Kickstarter project called reaDIYmate tried to link the online and offline world with a line of toys that took action when certain online events triggered them.

I think these sorts of projects are one of the most interesting areas of the web (real world?) right now because they will help bridge the places where we spend most of our physical energy to the place where many of us expend our emotional and mental energy. They also represent the beginning of user interfaces that are based on context. Earlier this year I wrote:

And yes, there are probably far more complex ways to cross the Web–real world divide. But by bringing this to a wider audience and by making it fun, these companies are on the bleeding edge of how we’ll interact with our devices going forward.

So while we’re busy trying to make computers intelligent, projects like this one are an alternative step to making people feel like their computers are intelligent, by giving our machines more context about where we are and what we’re doing without ever sitting at a keyboard or touching a screen.

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There’s still some work to be done here by the creator, who goes by the name of “hairygael’ on his InMoov blog, but it’s impressive, nonetheless. The printed plastic arm is filled with servo motors at every joint and the action takes place via an Arduino platform and keyboard.

Geeks with access to a 3-D printer can replicate the robotic hand as the printer design file is freely available here, along with instructions to print the hand. Aside from the geek factor of a working robot hand, this project emphasizes that not only will we one day be able to print our own 3-D objects, but we can replicate those from others. There’s no need to design everything in the future; just print it!

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I’m fascinated by projects that enable people to make the Web into a physical reality, such as this Christmas light display for IM status, so when I saw this KickStarter project for reaDIYmate, I was excited. Chris Dixon, the founder of Hunch, tweeted a link to this project, which contains a kit that lets you connect an electronics module to a cardboard-encased mini motor and speaker. You decorate the cardboard however you like, and the end result is an object that takes a specific action when a specific online occurrence happens.

So if you get a DM, for example, your robot sculpture might beep and move forward, or you can set it up to move and make a noise instead of hearing a boring calendar notification. The variations are endless, and I’m kind of excited by the idea of hooking something not just to an online service but also to something broadband-enabled in my home. For example, I wear a Fitbit most days, and it would be fun to connect it easily to some physical object on my desk and have that object take action when my activity levels are too low. I’m imagining a little robot that waves his arms and says, “Danger, Stacey, danger!” which will remind me to get up and move around. But even the first two examples can help keep me in touch with the Web if I am not at my desk or can’t hear my phone.

The Fitbit tracker

Projects such as the reaDIYmate or the Arduino boards that Maker Shed sells are only one element of this trend of embodying computing in the real world. Startup Ifttt — short for IfThisThenThat — is making it easy to combine Web services and elements to broaden or change their function. Linden Tibbets, the CEO of Ifttt, explains that the goal behind his startup was to make the Web services and digital elements in our lives versatile in the way the real, 3-D objects are versatile.

For example a coffee cup in the real world is both a vessel for drinking coffee (or soup or tea or whatever), but it can also be used as a paperweight when a fan is turned on and our papers start blowing around. Digital services don’t have that flexibility, and most people don’t know how to unlock it even if the services could be hacked for another purpose. Ifttt tries to take users one step closer to hacking their Web problems using an easy interface and recipes.

Think about pairing a Craigslist search and Gtalk and activating that combo through Ifttt; when a certain search term pops up on Craigslist, it will pop up on my Gtalk as a message. It takes about four to seven steps to make such an action happen, which is far easier than earlier efforts to make the Web a little easier for nonprogrammers to hack. Remember Yahoo Pipes? It was so cool but so hard.

With Ifttt’s building programs, called recipes, such as “Every time you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, it will be sent to Dropbox,” or “When a new book is added to Kindle Top 100 Free eBooks, send me an email,” these actions take just a minute. You sign into services, tell them what to do using the Ifttt interface, and you are done. Here’s one I did this afternoon after seeing a friend complain about saving tweets she wanted to read later.

The reaDIYmate also can be tied into Ifttt commands, which is a nice way to bring the ease of programming the Web to something that makes it easy to program physical objects. This is awesome for the Web today, but it gets exponentially cooler when we bring sensors and the Internet of things into it. So my Fitbit example may not be as far off as I think, if Ifttt can access the API for my device and the device is in relatively constant communications with the Web. Right now this last step is hard, because the wireless used by the Fitbit to communicate is a proprietary version, but with low-power standards hitting the mainstream this may be fixed.

And yes, there are probably far more complex ways to cross the Web–real world divide. But by bringing this to a wider audience and by making it fun, these companies are on the bleeding edge of how we’ll interact with our devices going forward.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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