Tinker Lab at Peter Mayer in New Orleans recently presented our latest TinkerShot prototype at #BarcampNola8. This ppt covers Tinkershot prototype, our process, the tech, and the code.
@TinkerPM | Tinker.peteramayer.com
Cover Page: TALRSH – TinkerShot Alcohol Liquid Reward System for Humans.
Agenda
Tweet us and we will do our best to answer your questions!
Overview of the lab at PM. Why? What? How? Is explained.
The world
Technologies we focused on
Our Approach – Iterative, HCD etc
Clients/Brands and their need to differentiate
We live in a highly connected multichannel world,
where physical and digital experiences converge to
create more immersive, emotional and lasting impressions with consumers.
We had to step up our game to maintain relevance and currency in this ever changing landscape.
So we build a lab with a small budget, an unused cubicle and a couple of interesting ideas! Here we go!
Lab allows us to explore new modes of interaction, communication and storytelling.
We did some research and looked for tech that was scalable, flexible and extensible.
To get started we identified interesting bits of tech that we wanted to play around with.
Power. Good networking graphics card. A single unit can support real-time rendering
push feeds out across a network to any screen with little trouble.
Size. Small -- meaning anything can become connected and responsive – environmental displays, architecture, products and wearables.
Cost. Super cheap! $39 – which means SAVINGS in terms of hardware, logistics, energy consumption etc.
Has a whole ecosystem of components for the Pi .
There is always a device being created that connects to the Pi to enable some function or add some feature.
Focus on Gertboard. Touch on wearables. Flora from AdaFruit and the Arduino UNO
But the Gertboard plugs directly into your Raspberry Pi,
And in our case --- drive a motor – the Peristaltic Pump!
Beacons – why so interesting to us.
location awareness and context!
tying a unique ID to a small device that makes it discoverable
Location and other relevant context about the beacon's location or what it is attached to.
Tore apart a couple and and are attempting to make a wearable (bolo tie) –
so as the beacon moves it interact with its surroundings and provides
various kinds of contextual feedback to the wearer
Tinker is based on the idea that it’s OK to fail.
Human-centered design is all about experimenting and learning by doing
We give ourselves permission to fail and to learn from our mistakes.
Perfection makes it hard to take risks. It limits the possibilities to create more radical change.
OK to fail.
By fail, we mean learning from designed experiments that we test.
If the result wasn’t what we expected, we still learned something and
that became the next step in our process to improve the end product.
Next: A couple of experiments that lead us to TinkerShot.
Simple experiment. Hooked our Pi to Twitter and had it Tweet it’s internal core temperature every 30 minutes.
Simple test. Use a push button to send a tweet>
Misunderstanding of how the GPIO signals were received by our code
running on the Raspberry Pi, we inadvertently created a device to deliver a Twitter bomb.
Our first attempt resulted in hundreds of tweets being released in less than two seconds!
It posed some interesting possibilities, but we are tabling this for now.
Attached RaspiCam to our Pi. Use a Tweet to trigger an event. In this case, take a picture and post to Twitter.
So we did a number of simple experiments. We got bored, no one was interested in our Raspeberry Pi picture tweeting.
So we talked about we had made and what we should do next.
We like to drink. What if you could Tweet yourself to a shot? Northwestern Univ. PhD student created a low cost liquid reward system for her lab rats. Talk about Open source (GitHub).
Quickie on TinkerShot. Iterate! Finished prototype. How it works.
Create lasting impressions through connected, impactful experiential marketing activations.
personal connections between brands and consumers by creating real-life experiences that are worth sharing. These experiences combine digital and real-world connections to create stronger memories and emotional bonds between brands and consumers.
Be real. consumers are often anti-advertising and want authenticity. Make it about the consumer more than the product.
Spark curiosity. busy lives. If I see someone handing out samples, or offering tickets, I walk away. Make it an intriguing experience and spark my curiosity.
Use technology. Consumers love technology and innovation. Make these part of the experience
Support it in all channels. The crucial component to ensure success is that your idea can live and be experienced across all channels.
Finished prototype
TinkerShot sends a Tweet!
Take it Keegan!
Let’s review some of the technology behind TinkerShot that makes all this work.
Why NodeJS?
Node was a good choice because of several reasons.
1.NPM is robust. There’s a lot of packages that do a lot of things – including a lot of the functionality out of the box.
2.Node already has well formed libraries and packages to handle a good chunk of the functionality we need.
3.Node enforces an asynchronous and event-based style of programming – we knew that our target behaviors were event-based.
4.JavaScript is Fun!
Twitter API — Easiest Social API for Frictionless User Experience
Streaming API
Image Upload
Easy access to user tweets
Gertboard — The Nervous System of TinkerShot
The Gertboard Extends the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO feature with a nice array of useful features.
To build TinkerShot we used:
1.Buffered IO
2.Analogue to Digital and Digital to Analogue Converters
3.Motor Controller
Raspberry Pi Camera
The Camera Module adds a small and easy way to take pictures programmatically.
Force Resistant Sensor
We used the FSR to detect when the user had lifted their glass from the coaster.
Peristaltic Pump
The Pump, in combination with the Gertboard’s Motor Controller and an external power supply, is a food-safe liquid delivery device.