Check out this cool video from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) July 23-27, 2007 in Portland, Oregon, featuring (two of my heroes) Phillip Torrone, Senior Editor of MAKE Magazine and Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, discussing the relatively new idea of open-source hardware.

It’s worth a look, if only to see Limor jam all the WiFi in the room with her hand-held Wave Bubble!

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I really enjoyed watching this hour-long talk by Jonathan Oxer, entitled “Hardware/Software Hacking: Joining the Real and the Virtual,” which addresses the growing trends in physical computing, and the process of connecting the physical world with the virtual.

~ from Google Tech Talks, July 31, 2007

ABSTRACT

Software developers usually confine themselves to working entirely within the runtime environment of a computer just pushing around bits and pixels. Even virtual worlds such as Second Life exist only in the confines of our CPUs.

On the other hand, hardware hacking has really taken off in recent years and there are now magazines such as MAKE devoted to modifying everyday objects. It’s a lot easier than software jockeys may expect, and this talk will begin with an entertaining exploration of simple ways to get started with linking a computer to real-world objects.

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