Built by Mobile Radicals, a group of researchers and developers at Lancaster University in the U.K., the little jukebox lets users input their music tastes by tapping their phones on the device. The combined tastes of the group determine the playlist, which is streamed from Spotify. The playlist is fluid depending on people’s participation, so no one user can hog the music with their own favorites. There is also a limit on how many times a user can check in, and the majority has to agree on a musical genre for it to get played.

CheckinDJ uses a capability that many smartphones already have – near field communication (NFC), similar to RFID and present for example in the Samsung Galaxy SIII (Samsung calls them TecTiles). Checking in involves tapping the phone to the CheckinDJ “jukebox,” which is built off a Raspberry Pi mini-PC. CheckinDJ can also be used with other NFC-tagged items like library or loyalty cards, and once a few musical genres are selected and a social network identity is input (this happens automatically when using smartphones), the user can enter the jukebox “system of influence,” where they will start to affect the playlist.

Playlist influence increases with each additional linked social networking account and each new connected friend that checks in. The system updates every 20 seconds to adapt to changing group composition and preferences. CheckinDJ sounds like the perfect app to help turn your neighborhood diner into a Harlem Shake flash mob.

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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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Now, a higher-powered computer announced in November, the Odroid U2, is available and will set you back $89. Although Odroid is aimed at developers, anyone with a little technical know-how can use it for a full desktop experience.

The Odroid U2 is leaps and bounds more capable than the Raspberry Pi, which explains the higher cost. A quad-core 1.7 GHz Samsung chip powers the device, which is smaller than a credit card. A full 2 GB of memory, two USB ports, integrated Ethernet and a Mali-400 Quad Core 440MHz graphics chip are all on board. Essentially, Odroid U2 has the guts and computational capability of a high-end smartphone from about a year ago for $89.

What could you do with this mini-computer? On his Tao of Mac blog, Rui Carmo shares some of his recent experiences with the Odroid U2, which include installing a customized version of Android, adding Python for Android, a remote desktop client and later installing Linux. All of this runs on the 1920 x 1080 monitor Carmo attached to the Odroid U2. His thoughts?

“Most people would probably look at using this as a media centre (for which it is eminently suitable), to run arcade emulators (which I did, but mostly to be amazed at the speed of the thing), and, of course, for testing apps.

Me, I set up Evernote, Facebook Messenger and Flipboard on it (besides a number of Google Apps and a couple of terminal emulators), and soon had a couple of Android apps of my own running on it — one of them compiled locally using AIDE.”

Would I recommend running out and buying an Odroid as your next primary computer? Not at all. But for those who like to tinker, want to run Android or use a flavor of Linux for ARM on the desktop as a secondary, low-cost device, this is worth a look.

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The TI gear lets companies add Wi-Fi connectivity to garage door openers, door locks, lamps, cameras or anything else without requiring manufacturers to bear the added expense of including a display or input device. The user will connect devices containing the module via their smartphone, which is the great enabler for the internet of things. That means it costs less to build connected devices, and presumably will make them easier to connect using a standard radio technology. Of course, there are other radio technologies that someone might want to use.

But, while figuring out a way to add connectivity to dumb devices without adding expensive components like screens or input devices (those also consume a lot of power, which is bad for battery-powered devices) is important, it’s not the only element we need to develop intelligent and connected environments. Another element that might make sense is a lightweight router that connects a network of sensors. For example, ThingSquare, which has created an open source hardware and software platform for the internet of things, called ThingSquare Mist that includes a lightweight router. The Co-founder of ThingSquare, Adam Dunkels, developed Contiki a programming language designed for connecting and communication between sensors.

Routers, gateways and more!

The ThingSquare Mist router, which was released right before Christmas, requires a mere 5 kilobytes of ROM and 1 kilobyte of RAM. The router runs on tiny, low-cost microcontrollers that can be on the sensor itself: no need for a computer gateway or a bulky Linux board. While this setup won’t work for every network, it’s great for sensor networks in remote locations where power is limited or even as a router to coordinate multiple sensors for some kind of mesh network to monitor physical health.

Once you have sensors, connectivity on those sensors, and some kind of router to collect and pass information between the sensors, you then need either a brain accessed through the cloud or on a device, like the Raspberry Pi or maybe even your smartphone. Or maybe your router will look more like a gateway that speaks several different radio standards, which is what the MobiPlug box or SmartThings hub offers. Figuring out what people will use depends on whether or not it makes sense to have your intelligence at the edge or in the cloud — a debate I covered yesterday.

Dunkels says that a smarter router/gateway device adds costs without providing visible functionality, which can be a hard sell for buyers. “It’s hard to sell a router,” he says. “It doesn’t do much. It just sits there. Suppose you want a system that monitors your plants. You’d rather buy the sensors for $10 and a service than buy the gateway that 20 times as expensive so you can have a moisture monitoring system.”

The Tado system

He added that putting a little bit more intelligence at the end point and then tapping into a cloud-based service is more viable, although if one looks at the comments on our post about the Tado thermostat, which was built using the ThingSquare system, people have a hard time buying an expensive service too. The thermostat is adaptive and basically a cheap box controlled by your smartphone, but also costs $126 a year for the overall service. In contrast, the Nest thermostat offers less of a “service” but it is a one-time purchase.

Oh, and what about security?

Finally, once you have the brains, the network and the storage of the data somewhere, there’s a final building block — security. ThingSquare, for example, lets sensors talk to the internet, but the internet can’t talk to the end points on the network. Of course there are different entry points for malicious actors. They could infiltrate the the network or device itself or access the data traversing the network or once it is stored in the cloud.

Questions remain about whether or not the hardware will require security built into the chips as some people seem to believe, or if there’s enough bandwidth (or power) available for encrypting data in some of the networking standards that the internet of things will use. Of course, we’ll still need the apps themselves and the availability of data or APIs that will make building services easy, but that’s a topic for another post.

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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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Now, six months on from that initial blitz of publicity, he says that it’s almost ready to go on sale for the first time. A finished version is due by the end of 2011, he told GigaOM, specifically aimed at programmers.

“It will be a small run of 10,000 machines given to developers in the hope that they will seed it with software,” Braben explains. “Sometime next year we should be able to release the consumer version.”

In and of itself, the device is pretty interesting. Inside a business card-sized case — they have moved away from the USB stick-style version that was previously shown — the computer acts as a hub for software and hardware.

The various ports allow you to plug in a mouse, keyboard, TV or monitor (both analog and digital), connect to Ethernet, or plug in an SD card or wireless dongle. In terms of what it can do, right now the machine can run a few Linux distros on its ARM architecture, but is looking for more options: which is why the first batch will be targeted at the software development community.

Here’s a video interview with the organization’s Eben Upton, conducted by ARMDevices.net, that shows you what they’re doing.

Although the charity has yet to announce precise details, it has said that it plans to offer a “buy one, give one” model that allows people to pay for extra units that can be distributed to children.

The main aim here, like other schemes such as the One Laptop Per Child project, is based around the idea of improving technical education. In particular, Raspberry Pi is about helping kids learn to code, rather than simply learn to use software like Microsoft Office — a move in education slammed by many, including Eric Schmidt of Google. In that, he says, it may capture the spirit of the BBC Micro, an educational, technological project that Raspberry Pi’s Cambridge-based team are intimately familiar with. It’s not the only scheme to do so.

Although Raspberry Pi will be available for worldwide shipping, the organization — which is a charity — plans to focus on rolling it out in Britain, and in particular to raise enough funds to distribute it widely.

“Our ambition is to give it for free to every school child in the country,” says Braben.

This will, if things go to plan, involve giving machines to an annual cohort of 700,000 children in a particular school grade: something that would cost approximately $17.5 million annually.

“People often say that every child has a PC at home,” he says. “And yes, if you look across the South East of England in particular, there are plenty of places where that is true — and Cambridge is probably one of them. But it is certainly not the case everywhere.”

But is a $25 computer what kids really need? When I wrote about the project earlier this year, I wondered whether building a new device actually ignored the fact that many children do actually have access to a computer — just not a PC. There are millions upon millions of mobile phones in the hands of kids all over Britain, and many times more than that worldwide.

When asked about this, Braben suggests that the relationship between computers and phones is complicated. Smartphones comparable in power to Raspberry Pi are still not common among children, even in privileged homes (and for good reason) and there are so many different operating systems, variants and languages involved that learning to code on one may not be particularly useful in a broad sense.

In the end, though, he thinks that something like Raspberry Pi can “cohabit” with mobile.

“The thing you have to realize is that most computers are pretty fundamentally uncool to kids — whereas what they do is exciting,” he says.

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“I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools,” Schmidt told the audience in Edinburgh, Scotland. “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but it doesn’t teach people how it’s made. It risks throwing away your great computing heritage.”

The heritage he refers to is rich, but often ignored today, since West coast companies dominate. But Britain did play its part in the development of the industry: the U.K. was the home of the first computer that could store programs, The Baby; the place where computer science pioneer Alan Turing lived and died; and the site of the first commercial business computer, LEO.

It wasn’t just stiff upper-lipped boffins meddling around with machines during the war, either. Britain was also the place where huge and unlikely institutions helped fire the home computer revolution of the 1980s.

Take a look at what the BBC did when it took on a mission to help educate and inform people about this coming revolution, for example, by embarking on what was known as the “Computer Literacy Project”. In 1981 one of the world’s foremost broadcasters produced a regular TV show about programming (yes, really) and at the same time threw its lot in with a local computer firm, Acorn, to produce a range of machines that could get people coding, and ended up in homes and schools across the country.

It was a move that brought massive dividends, helping breed at least two generations of bedroom coders, hackers and programmers and boosting a series of companies and technologies that ended up resulting what we know as chip maker ARM.

Now, 30 years on from that move, it seems the BBC is considering whether it should try again — by embarking on a new digital literacy initiative that could spark another revolution and help Britain respond to Schmidt’s criticisms.

The corporation is apparently undertaking a consultation to work out if it should back a ‘new BBC Micro’ scheme — and how it might do so.

The project, which is not yet live, is being led by academics at Manchester Metropolitan University. The group has been contacting people in the industry to ask them for ideas and contributions, according to this email reproduced on the Teach Computing blog.

If you were to make hardware available to schools in the same way as the BBC Micro in 1981, what sorts of hardware would you think was essential to develop the skills and understanding needed?

If you were designing a tv programme today that sought to have the same effect as The Computer Programme in stimulating interest in the most important new area of technological development, what area would you expect it to address and what topics would you expect it to cover? Would it still be in the field of computer science? What areas?

The ambition is fairly clear: “developing a project with the specific purpose of encouraging an interest in computers, computer science and computer programming amongst young people”. But the mail makes it obvious that the process is still incredibly early on — and, as a consultation, there’s clearly no guarantee it will end up with any tangible result.

But it does hint that some of Britain’s biggest institutions are trying to fix a serious issue. Indeed, on Twitter, Professor Keri Facer, who is leading the project, suggested the government and private companies may get heavily involved too. She was sure that partnership would be important, she said — “after all, the govt paid for the last BBC Micro project”.

Whatever happens, the scheme does tap into a wider movement trying to improve computer education — not just in Britain, but worldwide. One Cambridge-based consortium is already developing a low-cost computer known as Raspberry Pi, which is intended to help children learn to code. There is also, famously, the One Laptop Per Child scheme that span out of MIT.

It also chimes with a number of media critics and academics who suggest that not only are open technology systems vital to a healthy democracy — but that we need to make sure the next generation of computer users can really get inside those systems. As Douglas Rushkoff says: “Program or be programmed”.

BBC Micro photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Soupmeister

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Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, an annual shindig for Britain’s television industry, the Google chairman lamented the state of computer education in the U.K. and said that its failure to give kids the tools to program is having a long-term impact on the country.

“The UK is the home of so many media inventions,” he said. “It’s interesting that you invented photography, you invented television, you invented computers in both concept and in practice — it’s not widely known, but the world’s first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyon’s chain of tea shops. Interesting. Yet nobody, none of the world’s leading players in these fields are from the UK. That’s a problem.”

He pinpointed the problem as a growing divergence between science and the arts — a cultural shift towards the humanities that has left engineering, science and mathematics languishing. Schools now focus their computer classes on practicalities like learning the ins and outs of Microsoft Office, rather than giving children the tools to master machines.

“I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools,” Schmidt told the audience. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but it doesn’t teach people how it’s made. It risks throwing away your great computing heritage.”

You can see the potted highlights of his talk here:

The argument has received a strong response. For example This thread at the TES, a community for educators, vaccilates between anger and acceptance. “Did no-one else get a shiver of revulsion at a CEO of a multinational company like Google lecturing the educational community of this country on our curriculum?” asks one forum member.

Not everyone was defensive, though. In The Observer, columnist John Naughton (himself an engineer) said children need to be given a “license to tinker”, with support from government officials. Meanwhile, a report from the Educating Programmers Summit suggests that answers are needed but that “any solutions for the UK’s education issues are going to have to come from within”.

Of course, this argument is not entirely new. Fifty two years ago the famed British intellectual CP Snow outlined the problem of two divergent worlds of science and humanities — his so-called “Two Cultures” — that were failing to progress because they were not working in harmony. As a novelist and scientist, Snow believed there was a middle ground. Yet there has not been much progress since he called for a revolution.

But this is not just a British problem. American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has argued vociferously that schools in the U.S. face a similar dilemma. In his book Program Or Be Programmed, he says that if we do not understand how to control machines, they will end up controlling us. Writing on the Huffington Post last year, he called out the U.S. education system as a failure in much the same way as Schmidt.

Amazingly, America – the birthplace of the Internet – is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer “computer” classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today’s marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow’s.

Similarly, Jonathan Zittrain’s 2008 book The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It voices concerns that the rising popularity of closed systems like the iPhone mean users are moving further and further away from a genuine understanding of computers. His argument is essentially about the difference between being a user and a consumer.

The standard of computer teaching in America is much worse than Schmidt makes out, with public schools often bereft of any computer teaching. And the U.S. might have a stronger software culture thanks to Silicon Valley and some of the top colleges in the world, but if most kids aren’t getting the chance to learn programming skills perhaps the same decline that Britain has seen could be on the cards for America.

The reality is that this is a problem for much of the West.

So how do you fix it?

There are efforts to try. Individual teachers can do a heroic job, and there are schemes like the U.K.’s Raspberry Pi, an open, low-cost computer for schools. I gave that project a hard time in the past, but at least it is attempting to answer these questions. The real concern must be whether anything we do now is simply too little, too late. Is it?

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Braben, one of the men behind 1980s classic Elite, is now head of U.K. studio Frontier, but he’s continued his lifelong fascination with trying to help people learn how computers really work. That’s why the non-profit group has assembled an entire computer inside a USB stick, which it hopes to sell for just £15 ($24.50).

The whole thing seems barely large enough to carry a fully-functioning computer, but that’s what it is. Inside it there’s a 700MHz ARM-based processor, 128MB of RAM and a fully functioning operating system (the Ubuntu version of Linux). With an HDMI port at one end, it can be plugged into a screen, and the USB port allows it to be connected to a keyboard. There’s even an SD card slot for storage. Of course, these items add to the overall cost as well. The system is currently being prototyped, but the barriers to production seem fairly small.

It’s quite astonishing, really — and shows how fast technology has moved in the 30 years of personal computing.

Braben says projects like this are vital for introducing children in both the developed world and developing countries to real computing and to real programming, without a prohibitive cost barrier.

In this video, he explains the idea to the BBC:

The idea is that a cheap, lean machine allows children — who now spend more and more time learning to use pieces of software such as Microsoft Office that are many layers of abstraction away from the machine — to really start to understand how the computer works and get at the guts of it. According to Braben:

“You can use it to learn programming, to run Twitter, Facebook, whatever — but also to be able to understand the whole process of programming. A lot of things have been obfusticated [sic] these days, in the sense that you can’t get at them. There’s so much between you and doing something interesting or creative that it gets in the way — and hopefully this device will be one of the pieces that helps change that.”

I have a real soft spot for projects like this, whether it’s high-end attempts to rebalance the global education system such as the One Laptop Per Child project spun out of MIT, or the attempt by groups such as PlayPower to recondition existing low-cost hardware and open programming to a generation of kids in developing countries. I think they’re massively important in challenging our conceptions of what technology means, and vital in helping those who are capable of advanced programming to realize their abilities.

But there’s always a niggle or two. Are cheap computers really what the world needs? Is the gap between proprietary software and bedroom coding really the barrier that we need to vault?

Many people in developing countries already have access to a low-cost computer, in the form of the mobile phone. There are billions of devices out there, already in people’s hands. And though they may not be as open as education advocates would like, they are powerful and often programmable to some degree. Raspberry Pi and projects like it are laudable and necessary, but would they be better off harnessing the devices that are already out there?

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