Making things talk

Tom Igoe’s new book Making things talk arrived today, full of lovely projects and code examples. Tom’s previous book Physical computing has been the definitive reference for all hardware hacking that goes on at AHO and in the Touch project. Making things talk is structured into specific projects, and covers technology as part of practical examples.

The section on RFID uses the ever-useful ID12 RFID readers with project examples created using Processing.

The processing code was developed with Sara Johansson as part of the Sniff project in our tangible interactions course earlier this year, and it is great to see Sniff in a double page spread:

From our initial reading the book looks like an excellent introduction to creating physical networked things, using a very wide diversity of technologies. The project examples are well designed and extremely useful in order to move beyond conceptually simple networked things. As a place to start prototyping with RFID this is a great complement to some of the other RFID books out there.

Related things:

1. Sparkfun now selling ID12 readers We have been making a lot of prototypes with the Innovations ID12 RFID readers in the past few months. We’ve been getting them from the super-helpful Core RFID, and now Sparkfun is selling them.......
2. Future (NFC) phone is talk of festival! The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle......
3. Sonmicro RFID Processing library Last year we made a Processing library for the Sonmicro SM130 RFID read/write module together with Jørn Knutsen and Tom Igoe. The SM130 is a little module that lets you read and write to......
4. 50 things, places and people for 2008 On the last day of 2007 Dagbladet rounded up the 50 things, places and people they tip for 2008 (50 ting, steder og mennesker vi tror på i 2008). Sara Johansson is tipped at......
5. Internet of Things booklet Rob van Kranenburg is creating what looks like an interesting critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID: “The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks.......