MOTO Labs’ Daniell Hebert gave a talk on “Android Beyond the Phone” at the 2009 Maker Faire.
Daniell covered the basics of why the technology community is excited about Google’s new open source operating system, explained how Android will connect previously “dumb” devices, and shared his view on why Android is relevant to the maker community.
Watch the excerpts and get your Android 101:
The Maker Faire was a blast, and full of stimulating manifestations of DIY thinking+doing. We enjoyed sharing our experiments and prototypes with the MAKE crowd and look forward to next year.
Lately we’ve been tinkering with deploying Android beyond the phone (using Google’s open-source Android to connect devices to each other and the web), so we thought we’d see if we could leverage the efficiency of Android on a BeagleBoard, the accessibility of wireless webcams, and the ease of a Flickr feed to a custom Google Gadget to track the ups and downs of our metered utilities.
Why webcams? While there may be a few compelling (low-cost, low-impact) products out there to monitor your electric meter, there are no comparable products for reading gas or water meters.
So until the really smart grid arrives, here’s a way to chart your whole utility spend on your own Google homepage.
Home Energy Monitor Ecosystem
The MOTO DIY Android Home Energy Monitor (AHEM) utilizes an average wireless network. Wireless webcams take pictures of the ever-changing dials on the user’s utility meters. A BeagleBoard running Android and the MOTO AHEM custom applications push the pictures up to a Flickr photo set.
MOTO AHEM application prompts and transcribe numbers into your Flickr image tag. Saving the image spurs the MOTO Labs’ Google Gadget will automatically chart meter activity on the user’s Google home page.
Some of the folks at MAKE Magazine made a clever hack of the ubiquitous watt metering device, the Kill-A-Watt.Their Tweet-A-Watt lets you track consumption and measure efficiency on devices that are typical electricity hogs:air conditioning, washers, dryers, refrigerators.
We like the Tweet-A-Watt and we wanted to add it to our Google Gadget.So we leveraged the Tweet-A-Watt’s Python application to sit on the BeagleBoard’s linux layer, and added a Python interpreter on the BeagleBoard, then used a socket to communicate with our Android application for sending to Twitter. (We did this because Android does not support Python.)
Now we can track its activity and reporting on our homepage right alongside our whole-house utility chart.
You may have heard about the $4.5 billion the February stimulus package set aside for the build-out of our nation’s smart grid, but check out this description of billions more for associated technologies.
A recent report by Deliotte predicted “that in 2009, SmartGrid companies may generate $25 billion in revenues, and represent the biggest and fastest growing sector in the GreenTech - possibly even the entire - technology market.”
Read through a history of Earth2Tech’s editor Katie Fehrenbacher’s posts tagged “energy” and you’ll start to understand the players, the pace, and high stakes involved in this massive energy infrastructure upgrade. Check out also the archive of their recent GreenNet conference.
It was Fehrenbacher’s survey piece on Energy Dashboards for the Home that tipped us over to this somewhat reactionary choice of webcams for our metering system.
Energy pundit and engineer Saul Griffith’s Wattzon personal calculator tool might offer the smartest vision for a user experience that could fulfill this drive to know (and thus change) what we consume.
Google Power Meter is the one to watch, of course. Read Google’s letter to the California Public Utilities Commission where they assert the public’s right to access personal real-time smart grid data.
Saul Griffith’s sobering and very smart Climate Change Recalculated presentation depicts the challenge of the scale of infrastructure reorganization required to stymie the climate change snowball. Highly recommended.
Devices such as the iPhone have begun to scratch the surface of gesture-based software interfaces, yet large, true multi-touch interfaces are still rare, bulky, and expensive.
This recent prototype - a next iteration of labs’ Sensing Screen - promises effortless touch interaction, full multi-touch, a robust glass work surface, low stack height, with comparatively moderate cost. It does not utilize cameras or projection technology. This means that in production, this scalable technology could be very thin and very big. It could sit on legs like any table, or lay on a wall surface like any LCD panel.
This design meets a set of feature requirements for large multi-touch devices that no other system currently delivers.
Scalability: this prototype is 19 inches diagonal, but the technology can scale up to 50 inches and beyond.
True multi-touch: it is able to take direction from more than 2 fingers – it’s limited only by how many fingers you can fit on the screen.
High resolution: it can detect very small movements of the finger with good accuracy and precision.
Affordability: compared to other platforms, this solution promises moderate cost.
Definitive position sensing: no ghosting, no aliasing when crossing fingers over an axis.
Low profile: no cameras or projectors mean that this can be large and yet thin as an LCD panel.
Truly Social Multi-Touch
No cameras or projectors means that this solution promises authentic social interaction where the device does not obstruct user experience. Coffee table gaming or collaborative media making could be very natural, comfortable, and compelling.
State of the Art
Camera-and projector-based large touch panels such as Microsoft’s Surface table or Jeff Han/ Perceptive Pixel’s screens provide great interaction but require bulky housing for the camera projection technology. They also perform better in low-light environments, and are expensive.
Visual Planet’s ViP Interactive Foil can be applied as an overlay to LCD screens or even window surfaces (with rear camera projection/screen). Very scalable, but a single-touch solution.
Resistive screens are comparatively inexpensive, but they require force to activate (it can’t sense a hovering touch), and hence fail to provide effortless, gliding touch interaction. They are also less durable over time.
The iPhone uses a grid of ITO traces (long, thin, clear strips of conductive material) to transmit and receive the signals. However, ITO has too high a resistivity to be practical at screen sizes much greater than 8″.
The Basics
Our implementation is a lot like the iPhone’s – it’s a scanned capacitive approach where the presence of a finger on a sensor grid creates a detectable change in signal, thereby indicating position.
However, instead of using the iPhone’s ITO (indium tin oxide), MOTO’s implementation uses an array of extremely fine wires to conduct the signals, thereby sidestepping the challenges of ITO’s high resistivity.
How does it work? Sixty times a second, each row drives a signal which is received by all the columns. A finger will reduce the level of the signal reaching the columns along the finger touch line. Our technology registers this reduction in signal and interprets it as a touch.
The wires in this demo are clearly visible in part due to the moire effect, and in part because we have lit them for show. When fabricating a production screen, slight wiggles in much thinner gauge wires would make them considerably less conspicuous.
Related Stimuli on Future of Touch-Based Interaction
Google developed Android explicitly to run on cell phones, but it is robust enough to run on other devices. Because Android is open source, and supported by a robust development community, it is a candidate to grow beyond its mobile device roots.
The development of a USB driver brings Android operating system to the E Ink development kit. Now a new world of creative developers can extend the functionality of and write applications for this low-power screen technology.
E Ink is an electronic paper display technology with a paper-like, high contrast appearance, ultra low-power consumption, and a thin, light form. It is “bi-stable” - meaning it only uses power when it refreshes the screen. The advantages of this kind of low-power screen device updated via wireless internet access could bring this connected technology to wearable computing or other screen uses that demand long-term deployment before recharging.
Digging Deeper
MOTO labs is working towards customized solutions that employ not only Android but Ubuntu, Linux, and Adobe AIR platforms for custom web-connected application development. We are actively extending our multi-touch and gestural interfaces expertise to these platforms. MOTO is also developing prototypesfor better remote management of connected devices with a range of approachesfrom Mac & PC based device management applications to over-the-air wireless firmware and softwareupdates. Stay tuned to labs.moto.com for more on this thread.
Building a Bridge
Picture below shows how the E Ink broadsheet development kit is connected to Beagle Board via USB. A custom E Ink driver acts as the bridge.
The E Ink screen image shows the signature Android clock-scape.
Components
A diagrammatic view on how the application processor (Beagle Board) connects up to the display co-processor (E Ink Broadsheet) via USB.
Ideas for next generation connected devices? Email collaborate@labs.moto.com or leave a comment here.
This table is a departure from earlier examples because it is relatively easy to use by non-technical content creators. It works in most lighting because it doesn’t use a camera. It is market quality, and does not require tuning on location.
re.moto Boards and Modules - low-cost wireless device platform that builds on and extends Arduino and Making Things. Very easy to use with Processing and Flash. For designers to technical researchers.
re.moto Messenger (Client and Server) - web based platform for enabling devices to subscribe and publish messages to other globally or locally networked devices. A web-wide event bus: Like Twitter for devices.
A new type of interface that can sense and identify objects without touching the screen, and allows multiple simultaneous interactions with on-screen graphics. This innovation has many applications.
no physical contact needed to trigger
advanced multi-touch processing
lightweight flexible sensor matrix works on flat and curved surfaces
scales from small to wall-sized
can be deployed outdoors behind durable surfaces
RFID capability senses objects identity and position on surface
no cameras or tricky lighting calibration required
For more information on this type of interface, please explore Smart Skin by Jun Rekimoto of Sony
labs.MOTO.com is dedicated to sharing tools and technologies we have developed in our product development consulting practice, and to help further creativity in next generation of devices that talk to each other and to the web.
