ThingM blog

The Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (http://www.gaffta.org/) had a workshop for teachers of middle school students. They created a nice gender-neutral bracelet for sports fans using BlinkM MinMs (http://minm.thingm.com/)

As Grace says:
“The workshop went well. I had two teachers as my students, one who teaches middle school and one who writes curriculum for a children’s camp. They were both very interested in the MinMs and their potential to be used in teaching. One issue that came up was that one of the teachers was trying to come up with a gender neutral design and decided to make a 49ers wristband and wanted the LED to flash red, then yellow. However, we realized that there was no way to create a true yellow. We were able to get around it by covering the LED with yellow felt, as you can see from the video.”

programming the minms

making the bracelet

the almost finished bracelet

Go grab the latest issue of Make Magazine!  In addition to it having a wonderful run down of many of the different types of Arduino or Arduino-like boards out there, it also includes a project Mike & Tod created: CloudFridge.

CloudFridge makes your fridge door Internet-connected, creating a real-time graph of when and how long the door is open.  Applications of this data could range from a simple fridge energy monitor to diet planning.  But mostly it’s a demonstration of just how quickly one can go from idea to working implementation with tools such as Arduino, BlinkM, and Xively: we went from idea to working implementation in an afternoon.

We originally created this article over a year ago and its showing its age a bit (today the Arduino Yun would be a great alternative to what we used), but the techniques are still very valid. Thanks to the Make magazine staff for helping update the article in the light of the Pachube->Xively transition.  And check out this awesome cute title graphic they made for the article.