Making Things Talk

by Tom Igoe

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you've built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you'll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you're a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate -- whether they're microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases -- you can get them to interact.

Each chapter in contains instructions on how to build working projects that help you do just that. You With a little electronics know-how, basic (not necessarily in BASIC) programming skills, a couple of inexpensive microcontroller kits and some network modules to make them communicate using Ethernet, ZigBee, and Bluetooth, you can get started on these projects right away. With Making Things Talk , the possibilities are practically endless.

Genres: Design, Technology, Programming, Nonfiction, Reference, Computer Science

426 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2007

Reviews

[micha cardenas]

I used this book twice for my Intro to Electronics For Art Part 2 class. There are lots of great examples, but also enough missing information to add some extra challenges in the xbee duplex and bluetooth projects. It also doesn't cover wifi, saying that its expensive and can be replaced by xbee. Overall a good book with lots of great illustrations and incredibly valuable examples, but each of the projects is still going to take a lot of work to get working. A few problems seem to be just differences in hardware, such as the bluesmirf module that sparkfun sells now, which seems to use 19,200, or some baud rate other than 9600. Also, if you're using this for lilypad xbee, know that some users find that it only works at 19,200 baud, so you'll have to change the code. I ended up programming my xbees by hand and commenting out igoe's code for programming it in the arduino code altogether.

[Owen]

Wow, where to start. Just beginning chapter 3 now and I would say the handiest thing so far (besides a good intro to Processing/Arduino) would be on page 33, Mac OS X and Linux Serial Communication... basically seeing what serial ports are available with Terminal. Its given me confidence in Bluetooth again!

[Eryc Tri Juni S]

Making things talk is really interesting. But when computation become integrated to cloud, I guess it makes the things to start thinking even replicate itself. Sometimes reality bit stranger than fiction.

[Michael Bunsen]

omg!

[Michaelpenta]

If you are a bit dork, but love to be creative - this book rocks - make art that interacts with views and the world.

[Cheyenne]

Taking over the world one clapping monkey at a time

[Matthew Jarvis]

Amazing starting point to playing with arduino! Highly recommended if you want to start physical computing.

[Ralph Zoontjens]

Good practical guide for using technological components such as the XBee protocol.