Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I got home late afternoon Tuesday, and I’ve had a few days to reflect on the fun I had at Maker Faire. This was my third Maker Faire, but only the second one that I really worked at (at the first one, I had an exhibit, but I didn’t participate in the setup/teardown). At the 2007 San Mateo Maker Faire, I spent nearly all my time in the Maker Store, where we sell books, issues of Make, t-shirts, and my favorite, electronics kits. Make is nothing without its community, so we have a voracious appetite for kits from independent makers, and we sell these kits online and at events. These include kits like Adafruit’s MintyBoost, MiniPOV, electronic game kits from Grand Design and XGameStation.com, and a whole lot more. (The above photo shows Mark Frauenfelder trying out the Critter and Guitari cellular automata kit.)

At the Austin show, I worked in the store again. But this time, we had added a lot of new kits, and among the breakout sellers were the Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards. Arduino is generally described as a platform for physical computing (you can sense and control the physical world with them). It’s open source (both the hardware and software can be studied, modified, and passed on to others), and it’s very easy to program because it was designed by and for artists and designers. The board is based on the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, and the programming language is similar to Java.

One of the reasons that the Arduino did so well (we sold out of the pre-assembled boards fairly early the second day of the show) is that we also had a new book for sale: Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which is a full-color book with projects showing how to create amazing things with Arduino. It was a no-brainer for someone who wanted to play with Arduino to buy one or two Arduino boards along with the book. All they need to get to the Arduino equivalent of “Hello, World” is a USB cable, a computer (Mac, Windows, or Linux) to program the board, and a red LED to blink.

If it sounds like I’m shilling for product, well, I probably am, but my enthusiasm for it exceeds my desire to sell things to you. When I edited Tom’s book, I got the Arduino fever, and now my office is filled with sensors, displays, solar panels, passive components, LEDs, and Arduino boards. When I was a kid, I played with electronics and home computers whose capabilities were similar to Arduino’s. One of my big thrills at Maker Faire was setting up a ZigBee-based demo using a couple of Arduino boards that I put out and let people play with.

One of the cool things about working in the store was that we had a section reserved for the independent makers who build the kits we sell. Limor Fried of Adafruit spent a lot of time there talking about the MintyBoost and MiniPOV. Dave and Cheryl Hrynkiw of Solarbotics had a permanent crowd of kids, which led to us selling out of Mousebot kits really fast. Karl Papadantonakis of LEDKit.biz was showing off his amazing no-solder LED digital clock. Andre LaMothe of XGameStation.com demoed the 8-core Hydra game console and the XGameStation Pico. Jed Berk, maker of the Blubberbot autonomous/semi-domesticated blimp robot was also there. Raphael Abrams set up a great demo for the Daisy MP3 player and answered questions about it from attendees. And from my own neck of the woods, Paul Badger of ModernDevice was joined by David Fowler from uC Hobby to show off Paul’s Bare Bones Board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board that you build yourself! What’s more, all these folks gave talks and did workshops on their kits (more on that later).

So even though I was deep in the belly of a commercial enterprise for most of the faire, my responsibility was to connect these small independent kit makers with a community of people who are enthusiastic about their creations. What really blew me away was that there’s a growing market around people who take a cool idea, find a way to produce it in modest quantities, and maybe make a living selling them to enthusiastic fans who are going to learn a LOT from building and playing with their kits!

P.S. if anyone knows of a good, small Newtonian reflector telescope kit (or wants to design and manufacture one), let me know in the comments!

BIF-3 is over, I can’t wait for BIF-4. The day ended with a conversation between Walt Mossberg and Mark Cuban. I wrote it up in more detail over at the BIF Speak blog.

Originally posted on the BIF Speak blog.

Walt Mossberg continued his conversations on day 2 of BIF-3, bringing storyteller Clayton Christensen up on stage. It was refreshing to see Christensen say that the cell phone is poised to disrupt the personal computer because I’m a firm believer in that, too. What was really fun for me was the conversation about Nokia vs. Apple. If you’ve gotten a coffee or a beer in me, you’ve probably heard me rant on and on about this, but never as articulate as Christensen and Mossberg. Now you’re all in trouble, because I think I can speak more lucidly and loudly about this.

Christensen said his money is on Nokia to build a platform that disrupts the personal computer. Mossberg replied that Nokia has made several tries to do this, and they all sucked. I completely agree with Christensen, and even with Mossberg (who, for the record, made it clear he wasn’t placing bets). I have two phones in my pocket at all times: a Nokia 6290 and an Apple iPhone. When geeks ask me which cell phone they should buy, I give them a rundown on the issues and a little demo. The first thing I tell them is that if they are a geek and love tinkering with things and hacking them to do stuff that they won’t do out of the box, get a Nokia phone (but don’t get the 6290; I got it because it was the cheapest phone I could find running the latest version of the webkit browser). Then I tell them that both platforms use the same wonderful web browser, WebKit, which is the engine that powers both Safari and the S60 Browser.

There’s no question that the iPhone is a powerful product, and it’s going to get better. But my money’s on Nokia, too, for pretty much the same reasons Christensen has. Christensen said that the iPhone is a sustaining innovation: it keeps the iTunes Music Store platform alive in the face of more and more cellular companies competing with Apple on music downloads. But if you pick up a high end Nokia phone today and spend time tinkering with it… I mean really spend the time: download some of the 3rd-party software for it, mess around with Nokia’s Python interpreter, tweak every setting, and maybe even look at the free SDK and write a Hello, World. What I think you’ll see is a simmering cauldron of disruptive innovation, with a not-so-pretty user interface.

If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, let me jog your memory. What is Mac OS X? It’s a simmering cauldron of not-so-pretty disruptive innovation: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, the GNU Compiler Collection, the Apache web server, and much more. What Apple did was take a beautiful user interface (NEXTSTEP), make it even better, and put it on top of that mess. What happens when Nokia takes that crucial step?

update: I spoke with Walt Mossberg during the break, and he made an important point. It’s wrong to look at Mac OS X as just a pretty face on top of a mess of random bits, and what I wrote above frames it that way. The NEXTSTEP-derived bits that make Mac OS X so wonderful are a really thick part of the whole stack. And likewise, it would be wrong to look at Nokia’s Series 60 as just a mess of disjoint components; it has many usable bits, particular the S60 web browser, high on up the stack. Nokia still has a lot of work ahead of it. If I were them, I’d stop with the feature set they have now, and spend all my resources on making a user interface as good or better than the iPhone. This doesn’t mean changing their icons or rearranging the layout of controls. They need to refactor things in such a way that usability permeates the Series 60 operating system.

I’m in Providence today (Wednesday, October 10) and tomorrow at the BIF-3 conference. You can follow my postings over at the BIF Speak blog; I’ll be posting throughout both days.

Robert Blackwell of the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers sent me an announcement about this weekend’s Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Sounds pretty cool:

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP, a two-day, low-cost conference on Saturday and Sunday, October 13-14, 2007.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is an annual conference dedicated to the Perl programming language. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers hosted the first Perl Workshop based in the United States. This year, the Workshop has been expanded to two days. The 2007 Workshop is structured as a series of short lectures, but the atmosphere is low key and engaging: the perfect combination to open your mind and then cram it full of good stuff.

You can get more details here. Man, it’s been a long time since we had a Rhode Island Perl Mongers meetup. A lot of former RI PM folks have been coming to the Providence Geek Dinners, which is a great place to talk about Perl and many other technical topics!

This should be interesting.