Peter Kaptein

Hardware is becoming a commodity. Complex machines and powerful electronics that might have cost several thousands of euro’s can now be bought for a fraction of that price.

This development is creating new trends and new shifts in the fields of energy, wireless communication, the production of goods and foods and the so-called “Smart Spaces” which are part of the Roomware Project.

Taking these trends, Peter Kaptein from The Roomware Project will look at the possibilities people are getting for an increase of control, independence and quality in their personal life.

Taking Smart Spaces and domotica, Kaptein will focus on the fields that matter: improving the quality of life for people with disabilities and increasing safety on hazardous places.

Topics are:
- Trends in the next 5 to 10 years
- Do It Yourself Energy
- Do it yourself fabrication (Fablabs, return of craftmenship)
- Domotica and Smart Spaces
- New possibilities due to the increasing speed of wireless networks
- The possible next step for mobile phones: replacing our laptop as a thin client
- Increase in quality of products and goods
- Increase in quality of life
- Increase in safety
- Relevance

Next10 is a leading conference regarding new techbnologies and the web. This years conference will be held May 11 and May 12, 2010

Read more about this in this background article

On the Music and Bits Music Hackday we introduced together with the University of Eindhoven and Joris Zaalberg the first alpha of the Roomware XBee Mediator.

XBee?

An XBee (see image) is a device that uses a wireless protocol to transfer data. It has six analog and four digital ports allowing you to read data from sensors connected to the XBee and send data to other devices (like an Arduino board) to communicate.

Roomware Mediator?

In the new structure with the Roomware Socket Server we decided to separate the intelligence from the Server. In this structure, the server only passes the data and each and every devices “directly” communicates to any other device.

A Roomware Mediator:

1. Understands how to communicate to the device you connect to your Roomware Network Application
2. Understands how to communicate with the Roomware Server
3. Understands how to translate any input into action regarding the device it represents

Two parts

In the setup we chose for the XBee, we have:

1. A XBee Mediator (“Mediator A”) running on a computer, reading the input directly from the XBee’s via an XBee hub
2. A XBee Mediator Proxy running on the other side (“Application B”), representing “Mediator A”.

Writing and reading the pins on each XBee device

For each XBee connected to “Mediator A” a XBee Proxy Object is created in “Application B”, offering all the pins of the original XBee.

All data the XBee measures and broadcasts is directly available on the XBee Proxy Object. Vice versa: when you set the value on a pin on the XBee Proxy Object, this will be reflected on the actual XBee device.

See more about this in this post here.

No dependency on one technology

With WebSockets, you do not need the Roomware Server or Roomware Socket Server to do your work.

HTML5 now included

Where – until recently – only Java and Flash Applications allowed you to build web based applications capable of using the push-technology of Sockets, by using WebSockets, HTML5 applications will also be able to connect and communicate directly with Roomware Applications

Simple structure, simple deployment

The aim is to make it as simple as possible for users to use any kind of Push-technology like Sockets and WebSockets by offering a ready to go library with which the user only has to state which type of protocol he or she wants to use.

So when defining a Roomware Connection, the choice for your Roomware Applacitions in Java, Flash and .NET will be defined like this:

roomwareConnection.protocol = RoomwareConnection.WEBSOCKET;
or:
roomwareConnection.protocol = RoomwareConnection.UTPSOCKET;

At thursday, November 26, 2009 Peter Kaptein (Instant Interfaces) and Valerie Ivangorodsky (Vivango) of the Roomware Project offered the “Connection point” also deployed for the Cabellero Factory Business Event 2009  and the Music & Bits event last October. The NIMA MEE was held in the Brandboxx in Almere. In total there were over 250 people present that day.

The Nima MEE 2009 presented three finialists x 4 categories (Absolute Excellence, Innovation to the max, Completely Customer Connected and Most MVO).

Nima asked the Roomware project to install the Connection point to enable their visitors (over 250 marketing professionals) to exchange their contact data. The system works by scanning the QR-codes and deciphering them into readable text. When two people show their code the system perceives that as a match and sends an e-mail. Person “A” will receive the contact data of “B” and “B” the contact data of “A”.

This was possible via QR-codes produced by Peter Kaptein and printed on a second badge which could be scanned by the QR-code scanner. The QR-codes contained the full name, the function and the e-mail address of the person. There were more than 30 e-mail exchanges between people.

These guys are building some great tools and to do it they have basically rewritten what has come to be known as “the roomware server” into something similar yet completely different. This is all very shocking of course but since it  allows them to be highly productive the roomware team as a whole applauds it.

This did lead to a situation where there are now two versions of “the roomware server” out in the wild, one made in Java based on the concept of a central node that uses communicators to talk to different devices and one made in C# (code online soon!) based on mediators for each bit of hardware you want to support that are like drivers for the roomware operating system. I won’t get into details here, read Peter’s blog if you want to learn more, but looking at this unfolding we recently discussed how this all fits into the grand scheme of things and we decided the roomware project needs an upgrade. Not so much a software upgrade but more of a mission upgrade.

So what were doing is transforming the roomware project from an open source software project to the roomware foundation, which aims to supports the spread of knowledge and tools that allow the creation of roomware applications.

We hope to achieve this this by doing a lot of what we have been doing all along; things like organizing workshops and making sure the right people are talking to each other, but we will also put more effort in promoting what we feel are cool new roomware (-ish) projects on our website, blog and twitter feed and by telling people about them wherever we go.

What we will no longer be doing is supporting a single piece of software as the one and only solution for building roomware applications. We never really thought of the roomware server that way but it might have seemed like we did since it was the only piece of kit you could download from our website. From now on we’ll be offering a wider range of tools on our site and we invite anyone who develops tools for roomware to send us their links so we can offer a wide range of, curated, tools you will want to use for your next project.

In the coming months we’ll start updating our website to reflect our new goals:

• organize events where roomware developers and designers can meet
• showcase cool roomware projects on our site
• write about new roomware developments on the blog and twitter
• teach people about the tools and how to use them
• promote proper use of roomware through our manifesto and code of conduct

We hope this will make for a more energetic, open and successful project. And as always we can only do this with your help, be it helping out with coding or even just by sending us examples of your work so we can showcase it on the site.

On October 26 Valerie Ivangorodski and Peter Kaptein presented two concepts to use the phone as a Remote Control using RoomWare. Peter Kaptein showed a solution requiring a Android phone and using Sockets to connect to a RoomWare server. Valerie showed a more generic remote control where you can use any mobile phone to dial into a number and manipulate objects or RoomWare applications using your keyboard.

The presentation can be found here.

October 2, 2009, the RoomWare Project hosted the “electronic business cards” at The Cabellero Factory Business event. Using a simple setup with webcams and two laptops, people could exchange contact data using the QR-code printed at their visitor badges.

Read more about the backgrounds here.

Beyond RFID they are also doing some interesting things in the art space which neatly fit the latest Roomware project NARB; an online and mobile art guide with some roots in physical space as well.

Once inside, they were able to “tag” portfolio pieces from the 90 designers showcased that evening. A few days after the event, visitors would receive an email with some additional information and links to the portfolios of the works they had tagged.

A whuffie inspired experiment at Impakt festival 2008

An symphony installation at FITC in Amsterdam.