Rob van Kranenburg: The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID (2008)

The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks. It’s a critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID by Rob van Kranenburg. Rob examines what impact RFID and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society. He currently works at Waag Society as program leader for the Public Domain and wrote earlier an article about this topic in the Waag magazine and is the co-founder of the DIFR Network. The notebook features an introduction by journalist and writer Sean Dodson.

In Network Notebook #2, titled The Internet of Things, Rob van Kranenburg outlines his vision of the future. He tells of his early encounters with the kind of location-based technologies that will soon become commonplace, and what they may mean for us all. He explores the emergence of the “internet of things”, tracing us through its origins in the mundane back-end world of the international supply chain to the domestic applications that already exist in an embryonic stage. He also explains how the adoption of he technologies of the City Control is not inevitable, nor something that we must kindly accept nor sleepwalk into. In van Kranenburg’s account of the creation of the international network of Bricolabs, he also suggests how each of us can help contribute to building technologies of trust and empower ourselves in the age of mass surveillance and ambient technologies.

Table of Contents:
1. Forward: A tale of two cities Sean Dodson
2. Ambient Intelligence and its promises
3. Ambient Intelligence and its catches
4. Bricolabs
5. How to act

Network Notebooks editors: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Copy editing: Sean Dodson. Design: Studio Léon&Loes, Rotterdam http://www.leon-loes.nl. Print: Telstar Media, Pijnacker. Publisher: Insitute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Supported by: Amsterdam School of Design and Communication, Interactive Media (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and Waag Society, Amsterdam.
Network Notebooks 02, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2008. ISBN: 978-90-78146-06-3.

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Tom Igoe: Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects (2007)

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 will:
* Make your pet’s bed send you email
* Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
* Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
* Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
* Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
* And much more

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.

Published by O’Reilly, 2007
ISBN 0596510519, 9780596510510
426 pages

Key terms:
serial port, Bluetooth, RFID, Digi-Key, ASCII, Mac OS X, Arduino, serial communication, telnet, ZigBee, personal computer, breadboard, HTTP, Ethernet, myFont, Linux, accelerometer, rssi, sensor, potentiometer

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Francis Hunger (ed.): How I Learned to Love RFID (2006)

Reader / documentation from the workshops by HMKV Dortmund and RIXC Riga, 20-22 May 2006.

With texts and images by Dorothea Carls, Jasmina Tesanovic, Rob van Kranenburg, Bruce Sterling, Oliver Leistert, Timo Arnall, Franziska Nori, Inke Arns, Francis Hunger.

“The series of lectures brings together approaches and projects that artistically and critically deal with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology – a technology that is significantly being developed and advanced by companies and research institutes in Dortmund. This technology which at first glance seems to be a simple further development of the bar code (well known from the supermarket) is much more powerful that the good old bar code technology. RFID tags are passive radio transmitters, which upon receiving a minor wireless energy impulse are sending back the information stored on their memory. Today, this information can be read already at a distance of six meters – without the process getting noticed. In addition, with its unique identification numbering system, this technology will allow for a precise identification of every object worldwide. What will it be like to live in a world where all the objects constantly will be talking to each other?”

Publisher HMKV, Dortmund, 2006
[18] pages

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