Remote fish feeder using littleBits new Cloudbit

Can a just turned ten years old and his eight years old sister, never used littleBits before, create a project using littleBits and the Cloud module? Will our betta fish be fed in time?

We are a family of casual makers. My just turned 10 years old, Gab, and his sister Morgan both have a lot of Scratch experience but never used littleBits. We got onto the beta test list for the cloudbit module and was sent a cloudbit (Thanks littleBits!). I purchased the premium kit so that we have more parts to play with. With them in hand, Gabriel is tasked with first trying out the littleBits and then create a project with the betta cloudbit module.

littleBits

Gabriel and Morgan like the LittleBits system. "Robotics but simpler" is his immediate reaction. Morgan commented that the color coding of the module helps him locate and organize his work. He likes all of the sensors and output devices. He has used the pico board with Scratch before, but the pressure sensor and the pulse module is new to him. One of his favorite output is the vibration module, another new device.

The Bad

Two criticism from Gabriel is that

1. the fan is not strong enough
2. we wish the servo would "spin around all the way".

And most importantly the cloud module response time is very slow. In fact sometimes it seems to not work at all. We tried using twitter and SMS to trigger action on the littleBits and often it either is very slow or not worked at all.

Yum Yum Fish Feeder

After brain storming a bit we decided to build a fish feeder, as Gabriel's daily task is to feed our only family pet ORO (Octo Rainbow Odo) beta fish. With a cloud powered fish feeder, we can feed the fish when we are not home. Seems easy enough? But Gabriel insisted on feeding ORO's daily 3 fish pellets one at a time. If we throw all three pellets in, the fish gets confused and sometimes does not eat the pellets.

Which Output Module

Prototype Testing

We started brain storming and experimented with each of the outputs to get ideas. Because Gabriel and Morgan has started building another project using the servo module, they wanted to use the servo with some sort of cardboard attachment to push the pellets into the fish bowl. But the pellets are too small to make this work effectively.

We tried the fan, but it is too weak to blow the very small fish pellets down a chute. (Dad's mental note: perhaps concentrating the airflow would have helped). Then we settled on the vibration module.

First prototype

We build a little chute with a toilet paper roll (from the standard family maker material inventory?). Taped the vibration module to it and crumbled up there bits of paper as test pellets. It worked ! Gabriel built a stand to hold the chute and off we went testing the prototype. For testing we just used the roller switch as the controller to speed up our test time. It worked pretty well, but...

When we put the actual tiny fish pellets on the chute, they would not move. The fish pellets are too small and too light. The vibration module does not create enough 'shake' with the toilet paper roll.

Final Device

We had bits of paper laying around, so we build a very simple chute with a piece of paper. A lighter chute means stronger shake? Dad's extra input is to put a fold at the end of the chute to hold the pellets better. This works. We hooked everything up, tested with the roller switched and it worked. We tested the cloud module before to make sure the IFTTT recipes worked. We replaced the roller switch with the cloud module, setup the fish feeder over the fish bowl, and fed our fish via SMS remotely.

You can view the project on the littlebits website for more details.

Project Video

Our brainstorming notes for this article

Chinese Postman Canvas Bag

I have a thing for bags, from Jack Spade to my recent order of their Waxed Canvas bag from Wear Gustin. I walked out of my apartment building in Shanghai today and see this beauty - a real bicycle used by our local postman for delivering mail to my building. Take a look at that bike and the canvas bags on it. well worn but functional.

Enjoy the pictures.

EventDove is much more then a EventBrite Clone

I learnt of EventDove several years ago via my Boston connections. I even used it once at a small local event in the Boston area, but honestly did not find it particularly different from eventbrite. I was so wrong.

I attended a talk by Jun Chang, the CEO and founder of EventDove in Shanghai. She gave a very personal talk about the company and it's business model. My key takeaways make me believe that this company is going to be very successful:

EventDove focuses on B2B

While the EventDove platform clearly is useful for event registration services for events of any size, (there is a free plan), the company is focused on servicing large scale, repeated customers. EventDove often provide back end system integration with their larger customers to provide many features that may not be visible to the event attendees. This provide a high barrier of entry for competitors, and high exit costs for their integrated customers.

These integration reaches beyond event organizers. It can include event revenues operators as well, which are a source of new customers.

A customer is a customer when they are paying for the service

Jun stress that while she values all customers who uses her platform, paying customers are where she is concentrating her companies resources on. The initial paying customer based is most important. Having worked with many start ups, I completely agrees with her. A start up sometimes too eagerly chases after potential paying customers by listening to their non paying customers too much.

O2O - Online too Offline (and back)

This is a key feature of EventDove that I did not see before because I did not attend a large scale event serviced by EventDove. Their platform has significant feature set to support onsite registrations, badge handling and much more. It is geared towards a large scale event hosted at a convention type venue. These onsite, off line features, with venue system integration, create another high barrier of entry for competitors.

EDM and Data Mining

As EventDove is used by more and more conference venues, with it's integration with both the event organizers and venues, it has access to a large data set of attendees. While currently the platform can feed this data back to the conference organizer for used in the electronic direct mail (EDM) marketing, is it possible for EventDove to mine this dataset across events and organizers?

Jun also mentioned that events in China a slowly moving away from focusing on big name speakers as the key marketing source. As the event organizers focus more on the content of the events, and the quality of the attendees, (think barcamp) can EventDove leverage it's combined attendee dataset and provide social networking features like meetup.com?

Standards and Platform

If EventDove is the first platform to integrate event organizers and event venue operators, it has the potential to set the standard for data exchange in this space.  Will it become *the* platform for large scale event hosting?

Dove

I want to end this summary with a fun fact. The "Dove" in the name EventDove has a meaning that perhaps get lots in the English name. Doves can also be referring to carrier pigeons. They carry information back and forth. EventDove then is a platform for information exchange between event organizers, attendees and venue operators!

Chinese Support on the Mac

Another reason for loving Apple products is that their operating system naturally support multiple languages. If you want to see how easy it is to enable Chinese input support on your Mac, read my article over at backtoshanghai.com.

Nockco Pen Cases in Shanghai

If you love pens, you must have heard of Brad Dowdy's new venture, together with Jeffrey Bruckwicki, Nockco by now. I backed the Kickstarter campaign and had my five cases arrived at home in Boston for awhile. Unfortunately I am in Shanghai myself. I finally got two of the cases brought to me this week from home, and here they are! Better than the pictures. Now my pen's are protected while I am in Shanghai.

Localized Advertisement in China

Some brand, like Apple, is such a global brand that it can use mostly standardized advertising across the globe. However in general is it possible to have one standard universal story for the entire world? Or is a localized story more effective?

Example

Here is an example from a Chinese company point of view. I saw this ad on a Shanghai subway car. It is for a job board company called liepin.com.

Even if you do not read Chinese, can you guess what is the copy? If you guessed the left pane says something like "I lost my job", and the right pane says "you are hired" you will be very wrong.

The left pane says:

When I went home during Chinese New Year (a very common thing to do for Chinese, travelling to their family home to spend time with the extended family) I saw my parent's getting so old, I tell myself I want to give them a better life.

The right pane says "headhunters will recommend great jobs, changes start at liepin (the advertiser)"

Local Story

It is a very common story for adult children to return to their family home to visit their parents during the big Chinese New Year (Spring Festival 春节）. There is also a (older) cultural expectation and responsibility to support your parents. Therefore this advertisement story is quite powerful. Would this work in the US? Absolutely not.

Schadenfreude

I found this draft post in my notes from 10 years ago. Must have learnt this from my German staff when I was working in Frankfurt!

Schadenfreude -- a handy word which translates loosely as "taking pleasure in the misery of others." See wikipedia

How Not to Peel a Garlic in 10 Seconds

This video from saveur.com has been making the rounds on the Internet. It is entertaining, but really?

1. If you following his directions, timing yourself, you will find that it took more than 10 seconds
2. If you have a tight counter, you will spend time cleaning up after you smashed the garlic
3. Do you have two big metal bowls?
4. Add in the time it takes to pick each clove out of the bowl
5. and what's wrong with garlic hands? I love garlic, and the small of it.

I personally prefer the way of smashing each clove with the side of chef's knife and hand peeling each clove. Much more satisfying to be "one with the garlic"...

Manslow's hierarchy of needs in the Digital Age

Inspired by many versions of Manslow's Hierarchy of needs with wifi, I created this version with more specifics:

Agile in China, Stand Up Meetings

As the start of a serie of articles on Agile in China, this is a some what lighter first post.

I send this to my teams today:

Better Stand Up meeting for scrum

Last week I attended a very good seminar by an international Agile expert. He says it is very important to keep stand up meeting short. He said one good way to have shorter meeting is to stand on just one leg during the stand up meeting.

I know this is not easy but we should try. It will also give us stronger legs. Good for soccer (or dancing! )Let us try this in today's stand up meeting.

(Bad Chinese translation:)

上周，我参加了一个国际敏捷专家的研讨会。他说，保持站立会(standup meeting)议短这是非常重要的，一个好办法是用一条腿站立。 

我知道这并不容易，但我们应该尝试。它也会给我们更强的腿。适合足球 ! (或跳舞?) 请大家在今天的站立会试一试。

Thanks!
P.K.
4/1/2014

Results

If you have read this far, I hope you are laughing rather then shaking your heads. Humor I believe is part of having an agile and growth mindset. My teams, unfortunately for me, was not tricked by this all.

Barcamp Shanghai 2014

One of the best way to meet interesting people is to attend barcamp. I went to the first barcamp in Boston 7 years ago. In fact 2014 is likely going to be the very first year I am going to miss attending BarcampBoston 8 because I am in Shanghai.

Luckily there is barcamp Shanghai 2014 ! I went yesterday. Met a bunch of interest people. Gave a presentation on my experience in creating and running an after school Scratch club. These are the slides:

Scratch barcamp shanghai_2014 from PK Shiu

The video that I showed is here, originally created for the MIT ScratchEd site:

Raspberry Pi gets a Real Sound Card from Wolfson and Element14

I have been a big fan of the Raspberry Pi. It brings easy, affordable, high level computing tinkering to the masses. It is great for makers, educators and tinkerers. Today it gets a new sound card with lots of features from Element14. From their website:

Features

• 3.5 mm jack (4-pole) for a headset/boom mic combination for gaming or VoIP applications
• 3.5 mm jack for microphone input
• On-board MEMS microphone
• 3.5 mm jack stereo line input for connection to devices such as digital audio players (iPod etc.) or mobile phones
• 3.5 mm jack stereo line output for connection to devices such as external stereo amplifiers or powered speakers

• S/PDIF input and output
• On-board class D power amplifier for external speakers, with connection to external power source if needed.
• Small pin header for extra functions if they are low cost, already on-chip, and don't require any further components
• Raspberry Pi form factor

Note very important note is that this Wolfson Audio Card is only compatible with Raspberry Pis which feature the P5 pads, which can be found on Revision 2 Raspberry Pis onwards.

What makes this bitter sweet for me is that I am really into computer music. After I built my first "computer" when I was in high school, the first addition to it is a sound card. The computer is based on a SC/MP MK14 board. The "sound card" that I designed and built is based on the General Instrument AY-3-8910 chip.

Now years later, my kids can do the same with slightly more powerful hardware and software.

Teaching Younger Kids Programming using Scratch

Learning to code is all the rage these days.  While I do not completely agree with teaching programming for programming sake, I strongly believe that computational thinking is a crucial skills for children growing up in the 21st century. Scratch from MIT is a platform designed to effectively teach kids, including college students, computational thinking via programming using Scratch. But how young can you start? After running after school Scratch classes for a few years with K-6 kids, this is what I found about getting younger, 6 -7 years old, to use Scratch:

Attention Span

Any parents of a 6 years old can tell you, getting a 6 years old to sit down and focus for more than 20 minutes is difficult. Doing scratch at home actually is easier as there are less distraction. But do not count on being able to create a large Scratch project on one sitting.

Reading Skill

Scratch is very visual, and most basic blocks are color and shape coded. So one does not have to be able to read all the text on the blocks to use them. However it can get slightly frustrating if a child cannot find the blocks that she wants to use. One way to help is to prepare some basic blocks that the child may need, either by dragging them into the scratch area, or by printing them out on a piece of paper so that the child can just visually try to match the blocks.

Explain and re-enforce the color coding scheme: Block for movements, purple for looks (say blocks), etc will help.

Writing Skill

Similarly, if the child is going to have her characters say things (which is a good idea), she needs to be able to type, and spell. Some children gets frustrated, especially if they are aware that they “need” to spell the words correctly, when typing. Most often the parents get more frustrated as they see their children struggle to spell. My recommendation? Does not matter. What’s wrong with a character saying “trhjhirj ffweg3sffs” !!?

Mousing Skill

This can be a problem. Scratch is very much drag and drop. Depending on the amount and type of computer usage the child already has, using the mouse can be challenging. Drawing with the mouse is another skill that a child may not have developed. Here, Macs and one button mouse have an advantage. But a child will learn very quickly.

Drawing

For younger kids, sometimes just drawing sprites using the built in costume editor is fun enough. In a Scratch class, I usually get one younger kids that end up just using Scratch for drawing 90% of the time, and that’s fine.

Story Telling

The next step from drawing can be just adding say and wait blocks to their sprites. This way, one or two characters in a Scratch project can act out scenes, sometimes from their favorite book or TV (yikes) shows. At least this makes the child a digit content creator instead of a content consumer.

Scratch Cards

The Scratch team at MIT created a series of one page handouts called Scratch Cards. They are designed as mini activities that can be used in Scratch workshops. Because the activities are short, and usually the blocks are printed on the cards, they can be a great resource for quickly doing some project in Scratch. It always, always bug me that they do not just sell physical versions of these cards. Instead you need to download the PDF, print and laminate them. But they are very useful.

Remixing

A great way to learn Scratch, and it is built into the philosophy of Scratch, is to learn from each other by remixing each other’s project. Remixing is built into the Scratch platform. The only downside of learning by remixing is that often a child will get caught up looking for fun games to play on the Scratch website and forgets to remix. Especially for younger children some supervision is advised.

WeDo

Lego sells a set of kits under the name WeDo that can be programmed using Scratch or their own software. I highly recommend this as another activity for learning to use Scratch. Unfortunately all the cool Lego stuff are only available from their education division. ( )But individuals can buy directly from them. The kits are expensive, but they are good. One small catch right now is that the new version of Scratch, because it is web based, does not yet work with WeDo. So you have to use the older version (1.4) if you want to use WeDo. See some examples in this video, pass the 2 minutes mark.

Learning to Learn

So there you have it. I have seen many young kids starting off struggling with Scratch at 5 or 6 years old, and turned into a very competent Scratchers in one or two years. The skills and fun they acquired make it all worth it. One of the most important skills a child can acquire is to learn to learn:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” - Alvin Toffler

Squarespace has a URL formatting problem

I really like Squarespace. Their support of many of my favorite podcast (penaddict, ATP) helps. I have started to recommend and use Squarespace for many of my nonprofit websites (Fiske School PTO). Recently I started to convert some of my other blogs (loftykids.org) over. Immediately I run into a big problem. When Squarespace import (or create) a blog, it requires the blog entries to live under a suffix within the site's URL scheme. For example, the default suffix is "blog". This means all the blog entries will be of the form:

http://mydomain.com/blog/2013/01/fancy-title-1
http://mydomain.com/blog/2013/02/fancy-title-2
... etc ...
http://mydomain.com/blog/2013/02/fancy-title-n

There is no way to not have the /blog/ or /anything/ suffix, for example the following URL is not possible:

http://mydomain.com/2013/01/fancy-title-1

Currently most blog based website removes the suffix and use some sort of date notation only in the URL. The site of Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress, is a good example. Squarespace however cannot serves blog pages using this convention.

URL Mapping

Squarespace does have a URL mapping settings, where you can map one URL to another. However the mapping is a literal mapping. It does not support wildcard. i.e. you have to manually enter each page name. So you have to create a long list of URLs and issue permanent redirects for them one by one using this setting option. This is the only solution.

Customer Service

Squarespace always have great customer support. They respond to email or chat inquiries very quickly. This time is no different. I have to give kudos to the customer service reps that handle my inquiry regarding this bug. Stephanie D took my issue and spent a lot of time trying to get a definitive answer to whether this can be avoided with their tech team.

Interactive Unix Shell Tutor

Came across this website today curtesy of the MIT miters list serve: http://explainshell.com/

This site lets you enter a unix shell command and give you an explaining of what it does. It is pretty smart -- a great way to learn and teach shell usage.

It is time to get rid of the floppy disk icon metaphor

I was viewing a PDF in google chrome and wanted to save the PDF to my local drive. Hovering over the document, a icon bar popped up. To save the PDF obviously I press the floppy disk icon, right? I used floppy disk when I was in college. I remember Apple uses it a lot in its user interface. But I can tell you that my elementary age children have never seen a floppy disk in their lives and would never have guessed the meaning of the icon. It was more ironic to see this used in Chrome. Surely many of the young engineers at Google has never really used a floppy disk either, right? Apple is working hard to make the "Save to Disk" action unnecessary. So who is going to come up with the next great metaphor for "save" while we still need it?

1Q84 and Math

I made the "mistake" of picking up ichi Q hachi yon by Haruki Murakami. Of course I cannot put it down. Here is Tengo on Math:

"Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That's all it takes. You don't have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you."

Beautiful.

CustomMade and 18 Million

What can CustomMade do with it's new round of financing, 18 million dollars? a lot. I am lucky enough to experience the inside view of a large funding round like this for the second time. The first one, AdvisorTech Corp, was during the Internet Bubble years. 20 millions were nothing to talk about. This time around, the market conditions are much more realistic, and the CustomMade round is well deserved and it is a vote of confidence by the markets. One of the main success factors for CustomMade is the pairing of co-founders Seth Rosen and Mike Selguero. They have complimentary skills in a way that I have not seen for a long time.

Another factor of CustomMade's success is the first mover's advantage. While being first does not guarantee success, being first and having a team that have worked and worked to understand the customer gives CustomMade a tremendous advantage over any competitors. Any two sided market place business is difficult to understand. Which side of the market should subsidize the transaction (makers)? How to deal with competition within one side (how to encourage maker participation without shrinking the maker pool by favoring high performers)? How to match make between the two sides (customers and makers)? The CustomMade team has built up a lot of internal knowledge of how to make this market work.

But remember, to quote Mike quoting Seth:

A dollar raised is a dollar not earned -- Seth Rosen

This is a beautiful insight into the truth about startups -- Having raised this large round of financing just means that we are in the hot seat to delivery value to the investors by multiplying those dollars into revenue growth.

Here is a picture of @pks, @MoonlightLuke and @markstenquist working hard with their pen and paper... (We were signing forms for a welding class, to understand how to custom make objects!)

Review of Delineato Pro, a light weight diagramming tool for the Mac

I came across Delineato Pro almost by chance while browsing the App Store. A quick googling around, after reading the developer interaction with his users on macrumors forum, I bought it just to try it out. I wrote the review with it as you can see below. For the search engine: I recommend giving a try, especially if you are frustrated with the complicated feature set of OmniGraffle, and find pure mind mapping tools too restrictive in terms of layout.

Reviewing the perfect Hi-Tec-C pen, the Render K

I love fine point pens. All my fountain pens are either F or EF nibs. I use Sharpie F points. But I never gotten excited about the Hi-Tec-C and I never knew why, until this week.

After hearing Brad Dowdy and talked about the Render K many times on the Pen Addict Podcast, I decided to get one. Hoping on the  Kara Kustoms website, I saw that they have some limited editions available. Somehow the Raw stock version seems to be the most authentic version for a pen like the Render K, so I ordered one.

The Render K is everything it is suppose to be. A beautifully created pen with all the right lines and precision construction. I popped an old Hi-Tec-C refill that I had into the Render K, and I suddenly find myself loving the Hi-Tec-C ink. Then I realized why: I really dislike light weight pen. The standard Hi-Tec-C is the worst -- both light weight and thin. That is the reason I never liked it. Now with the weighty Render K, I really like writing with the Hi-Tec-C 0.4 mm refill now.

Note that this is a special raw stock edition. The body is deliberately not polished. I happen to like the look. When you buy a regular Render K from Kara Kustoms, it will look beautifully polished.