One of the vendors who sponsored yesterday’s Mobile DevCamp NYC hackathon just happened to be Orbotix. They make a robotized plastic ball, known as Sphero, that President Obama recently took a few minutes to “drive” during a brief visit to Orbotix’s hometown of Boulder. What’s more fun than POTUS getting Sphero to drive straight?
How about 40 or so hackers working with the Sphero SDK this past weekend to gain hacker glory and also win valuable tech gadgetry.
I got to see the results of their efforts at DevCamp Mobile NYC’s concluding demo hour on Sunday. In the minutes leading up to the final presentation, I gazed as Spheros careened around the hackathon room blinking and glowing different colors. Not your typical NYC hack event.
For those curious about what’s inside Orbotix’s digital spheroid, you may want to watch this video. It’s described by one of the founders as being a miniaturized Segway, which means its performing zillions of complicated positioning adjustments in real-time.
The other unusual gadget accessory the DevCamp hackers were experimenting with was NeuroSky’s MindWave. That’s the Star Trek-level EEG headset that can detect basic brain frequencies–concentration, meditation, and even eye blinking –and then, with their APIs, can be used to control just about anything that can be connected to an app.
Say, for example, linking to a Sphero.
The team known as Brattle mashed up these two technologies to create a battle of brain-waves app, pitting opponents’ ability to concentrate and thus move the Sphero’s in one direction or the other with their MindWave gear. Team Brattle ended up with a winning hack.
In a less competitive vein, the SpheroMynd crew instead focused their efforts on getting a MindWave wearer to direct the trajectory of a Sphero ball. The concept behind this hack is that if you could tune your brainwaves at the right level, Sphero would carve out ever narrower gyres. If not, the Sphero would instead orbit out to the next town. This team picked up an award as well.
I had the chance to chat with Adam Wilson, Orbotix’s Chief Software Architect, and learned about the amazing effort that went into engineering the Sphero. It’s built from commodity motor and digital parts, but with impressive IP that’s embedded and, yes, very well encrypted, into their firmware.
For those hackers inspired by this post, Adam tells me there is multi-city hackathon tour in the works. And there’s an event planned for NYC in the next few months. Check their blog for more details.
A casual observer of this event would not have failed to notice that DevCamp hackers had a strong urge to add a musical ingredient to their Sphero apps. For example, the Rock-n-Roll Sphero team managed to get this bot-ball to make right and left turns based on different guitar notes.
And a solo hacker, by the name of Jesse, took on the larger task of programming Sphero to dance in rhythm to different rock genres. Unfortunately, technical glitches prevented him from getting very far.
During his presentation, though, we all got a glimpse of this hack’s potential, as the Sphero bumped-and-grinded to the hard beat of “Born Under a Bad Sign”.
I was impressed.
If Jesse wants to post a KickStarter project to fund a Sphero-based adaptation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, count us in for $50.