DK Arvin is on the right.
DK Arvind, the creator of Speck & Specknet
What is Speck and Specknet?
The speckห were designed, right from the start, to have three functionality. The ability to sense, to process the data that you sensed and then the way in which to network these devices together. These are stand alone units. It meant to be autonomous in a sense that they are, they have their own battery. Some speck have their own battery, some uses primary cells. So, right from the start what we set is that we want it to have sensors, processor and that they can networked and solve large problems.
The way that it is difference from other things like Rasberry PI is that this are one unit which has a cpu and some memory and then you have a way of programming it. It meant for people learning how to program. The arduino started off as a way in which you have a simple module and then you add other things to it like sensor and radio to it. These are kinds of after-thought. They are not in-built from the start. Ours are built right from the starts. So that they way they design and the kinds of firmware which is what is controlling various part of it. The resources of these are designed right from the starts. That is a Speck.
Some version of Speck
There are different kinds of speck. The first one that we have are called the ‘prospeck’ and what it has it that it is a very gendered platform where you connect up to any four sensor and it has a processor and it has a radio so it could communicate with other ‘prospeck’. Then we start coming up with the whole series of these family of Speck devices and what we do with these family is that we starting to limited the sensor that we have. Now, you might say why did you do that? We did that because we realized that they large class of problem that you could solve are having different kinds of sensors in it where as otherwise what happens is that you have to connect all these sensors and driver and firmware start becoming a problem. You don’t have these problem with this and these are nice small and very compact now. The specialize ones are called the ‘Orient’ and the Orient had these sensor called the accelerometer, the meter meter the gyroscope and also the internal magnetic unit. You are able to capture the motion in 3D space. That is a very special one. So, you start with the Orient 1 which is like the ProSpeck then the Orient 2 and 3. There wasn’t really an Orient 4. We started it but it wasn’t really get far. We have now Orient 5 which is now exhibits in the Edinburgh Science festival. So the children come in, wear it and then their movement is then move the cartoon character on the screen. It is a great fun to do and it has been very popular with young children. That is a particular kinds of Speck. Then we have what we called the RespireSpeck. Now, this contain 3-axis accelerometer and it is small enough so you can wear it on the chest wall. [He show me the thing] You can use the plaster and wears it below the rip and what these does is that it measure the rotation of the chest walls and from that you can get the measure of the breathing rate or the breathing flow which you normally have that by using a measuring device on your nasal. This one is worn by patient in hospital up north of Scotland. Its transmit the information through internet by the beacon or a base station in their home. The next generation is called the ‘Respect’ that contains dual radio and also a Bluetooth 4.0 (low energy) and what you can do is that we can see all the data coming into an iPhone or iPad and we can use that as a means to go into a hospital or people home. You can have these iOS devices and you can use these a base station. So, instead of these things being isolated, they become clearly an internet of things as you know. We are the pioneers of that.
The Orent 5 that is now pilot test up in the north of Scotland
We also have other classes of device which are the prospect which are the one that I told you about. The first one they are different and we are now in Prospect 5 and the ProSpeck 5 has GPS on it. It has a magnetometer, temp sensor and these can be used for instance monitoring people.
The one that I am talking to you about are only contains input. The first one that we did contains output as well. These one are connected to actuator and there are another class that are being design right now which has actuator as well. When you think in term of programming, you have to think in terms of what is a sensor, what do you do with the sensor and what is your output. Your output can be driving a motor or a speaker or displaying something on the screen. Speck are always been about sensing, wireless networking and Actuators.
There are huge loads of applications that we have been involved in, There are three classes. Health care, environmental monitoring (animal, people where it needs to be low powered) and Digital media. We made a speck set for a flamingo dance that we mapped out their music and then her movement generated music. There are all these interesting idea. We have a lot of corroborators like a cello player and dancer where the movement define the music. There are event in the Edinburgh in the Art festival where we exhibit our stuff to show.
How come speck is not really out in public?
What we have done is that we have adopted the approach that its is not the devices that we wish to sell but it is the services that we wish to provides. We don’t wants to be device manufacture because it is not the way we wanted to be. For instance, our first project is in healthcare. It usually takes a long time because you have to go to clinical trail, you have to get it C-mark for a medical product. At the moment, our product is pending approval. We also have to do a lot of trail both in Clinic and peoples home. It will come not as a product but as a project. So, the NHS will be the one who provided these as they needs to know and be able to track these people. All the information that is feeding from the people are coming to our server here where we analyze and send report to the website. You can actually monitor the patient and you can monitor report per day or even every minute.
I have seen you are running workshop with designers and policy makers, is this the way to generate ideas as well?
We do that and it is called designSpeck and it came about after the course at GSA. Other design school wanted to do the same, so I combined them all together in a one course. I wanted to be too large so there are only 16 overall and we meet 4 times during the course. You went through the design council design process. Concept, flesh it out and then implementing the idea then exhibits them in the informatics building. We are the one who implement it and it is for a good reason. It is still quite hard to program because you still need to understand the basis of the problem (when you are programming). The challenge, of course, is that all highly specialized way of solution might involve graphical programming. You still need to have a degree in computer science. It is not as easy to get designer to interact with it straight away.
What language does it use?
The firmware is in C. The application layer is done in Python/Java but it is mainly python. We can also do this in Processing. This is what they used for the design student where the first prototypes was a soft-prototype in a sense that we showed them what would happen in python what it would be. The reason for doing it is because this is a specialist task.
Processing is mainly use to show people what would it look like.
We have also been doing things in Unity (Game engine) we develop scenario in unity and take out devices and animate our devices in real-time. Another way of doing it is that if you wanted to show that this building is monitored. Then you can created the building then run a simulators. The simulator then modeled how the Specks going to work together. We can show it graphically first.
The simulator allows us to sketch ideas as well but in a very technical level. If we deployed 25 Specks in this floors and then we know what the behaviors are. Now, we could have real Specks in the real world to communicate with the speck inside the unity engine.
Why is programming hard for designer?
Knowing that you know how to program that is very interesting because most designer don’t know how to program. They do not know how to think in Logical term using logical operators. That is real tipping point for all designer if they can program. It is like me trying to be creative and in the same ways we do think. We don’t call what we do a creative process but we called it a logical process where they are trained and the under pinning things is mathematical logic and mathematical generally which designer don’t have. There are up there and it is very different to bring it down. It is difficult to get them to learn how to get them to program.