Tinkerkit: a physical computing toolkit for designers: Main/Home Page
http://www.tinkerkit.com/
When Sensors and Social Networks Mix - ReadWriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when_sensors_and_social_networks_mix.php
littleBits
http://www.littlebits.cc/

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.

modular circuit boards

Electronic modules that stick together with magnets to make complete circuits

buéno

2009-06-04 IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

"Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas."

"As a first step, Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients being treated at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg who would have to volunteer to participate in the scheme. Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example."

"Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients. [They] will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population."

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas

F YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

Join us for a webcast about Web Squared on Thursday, June 25 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time with John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly.

"we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machine-learning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. ... As the information shadows become thicker, more substantial, the need for explicit metadata diminishes. Our cameras, our microphones, are becoming the eyes and ears of the Web, our motion sensors, proximity sensors its proprioception, GPS its sense of location. Indeed, the baby is growing up. We are meeting the Internet, and it is us"; "evidence shows that formal systems for adding a priori meaning to digital data are actually less powerful than informal systems that extract that meaning by feature recognition"; "There are many who worry about the dehumanizing effect of technology. We share that worry, but also see the counter-trend, that communication binds us together, gives us shared context, and ultimately shared identity"

Olympus Imaging's Akira Watanabe says 12 megapixels is enough for most users. Ars thinks he's on to something.

Why we've reached the end of the camera megapixel race

Very useful for students who don't know electronics.

Electronics tutorials, including ohm's law, resistor color codes power law, breadboards

complete learning material for beginning electronics

IMU

howto — warning: the wire colors are not correct!!