Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Igoe
Publisher: Make Books
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $17.29
You Save: $12.70 (42%)
New (35) Used (7) from $17.29
Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 8392
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Pages: 428
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0596510519
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.895
EAN: 9780596510510
Publication Date: September 28, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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Product Description
Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you've built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you'll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.
This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you're a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate -- whether they're microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases -- you can get them to interact.
Each chapter in contains instructions on how to build working projects that help you do just that. You will: - Make your pet's bed send you email
- Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
- Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
- Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
- Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
- And much more
With a little electronics know-how, basic (not necessarily in BASIC) programming skills, a couple of inexpensive microcontroller kits and some network modules to make them communicate using Ethernet, ZigBee, and Bluetooth, you can get started on these projects right away. With Making Things Talk, the possibilities are practically endless.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Bridging the gap from "virtually" to "physically"... October 30, 2007
Thomas Duff (Portland, OR United States)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
I don't think I've ever seen a book on "networking" devices be quite this much fun (as well as practical and hands-on)... Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects by Tom Igoe. Once you're done with this book, you'll know more about communication protocols and networking than you thought possible, and you'll know it well. And Spanky will be able to play pong, too...
Contents:
The Tools; The Simplest Network; A More Complex Network; Look Ma! No Computer; Communicating in (Near) Real Time; Wireless Communication; The Tools; How to Locate (Almost) Anything; Identification; And Another Thing; Where to Get Stuff; Program Listings; Index
Making Things Talk does an outstanding job of blending two different approaches. Books on communication and networking are common, but they are often dry as dirt and deal in how things work "virtually". How-to books, like the Make magazines from O'Reilly, show how to build really cool off-beat stuff, but there's only so much background you can get in a single article. Igoe is able to take the best of both those worlds and create a tutorial on how communications and networking protocols work, as well as how to build stuff that takes advantage of it. Through projects such as the networked CatCam, the Toxic Chemical Alarm, and my favorite, Monski Pong (a stuffed pong-playing monkey), you learn hardware, software, programming, protocols, troubleshooting, you name it. You could also make a course from this material, it's that complete.
While you'll do best with a bit of background in hardware and software design skills, he is very clear on what items are needed. Instead of just saying you need to get a certain capacitor, he tells you the part number as listed on a few different sites. Couple that with very clear pictures and detailed code listings, and your chances of success are pretty good. Surprisingly, the detail doesn't come across as handholding, either. It's just solid information, clearly written for someone who is interested in the subject, with fun outcomes along the way from serial wired communications to wireless, bluetooth, RFID, etc...
If you're looking to learn theory with hands-on reality, this is it.
Fun, fun, fun November 1, 2007
ueberhund (Salt Lake City, UT United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is awesome. It goes with the attitude that everything with a circuit is a tiny computer, so therefore, you should be able to program it. The author then proceeds to show how you can talk various items from around your house--combined with the right circuitry--turn into entirely new creations.
The book begins with the tools of the trade--soldering irons, breadboards, and lots and lots of circuit parts. The author then shows how these simple items can be used to create fun and useful items you can use around the house.
In one of the first projects, the authors show how to create a replacement mouse using one of your favorite stuffed animals. Once you get the basics down, they show how to do the same thing over Bluetooth. Other projects include a network interface so your cat can send email, a wireless RSS component that you can hook up to your TV, a cymbal monkey toxic chemical sensor, and a lot of fun stuff with RFID tags.
The projects in this book are fun to read, easy to follow, fun to build, and a great all around introduction to circuitry and circuit programming. The programs in this book will be easy for anyone with a familiarity with Java or a C-based language.
Finally, the book shows where to get all the stuff you'll need to build these projects. The book lists addresses of hardware manufactures, listing of the software used in the book, and full listings of all the programs used.
This is a great book, and a lot of fun for people who like to get their hands dirty with technology. It's well written, fun to read, and the final projects will impress your family and friends.
Hands-on into to computer networking November 3, 2007
uniq (El Dorado Hills, CA United States)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a well-written and perfectly illustrated book on practical wireless networking. It is apparent, that the author's goal was teaching (thankfully, no surprise here -- he teaches networking at New York University), not simply showing how something can be slapped together: for every project, he lays a brief but vivid description of the underlying technology, and then shows how to make it work in the real world.
The book is a perfect example of how to enable a reader to try things without much guessing: in addition to code listing and excellent pictures, in the chapter "Where to Get Stuff" the author lists manufacturers of necessary components, including the contact info, like phone numbers.
Everything Can Have A Voice!!! December 19, 2007
Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
'Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects' is a book for the tinkerer that wants to get into the guts of nearly any object and let it communicate back. From ripping up stuffed animals to learning how to network all sorts of devices together, the author doesn't just vaguely discuss the ideas of doing these things, he shows the steps for proceeding and making things come to life! Presented in full color (albeit on cheap paper which DOESN'T ruin the experience at all), this book is perfect for people who are interested in networking and tinkering far more than most regular people might want to!
If you like ripping things apart and modding away to see what you can bring to life, this book might be for you!!
***** RECOMMENDED
Incredible fun October 27, 2007
Agamiyya (usually in California)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love this book. I just *won* it at a Linux User's Group meeting and it is fun and smart and interesting. It introduces you to microcontrollers, RFID, GPS, BlueTooth, X10 and ZigBee along with network negotiation, addressing, modules, feedback, topology, location and identification. And its fun because all that learning is secondary to the fact that you get to build things that are really kind of amazing. You gotta love the internet connection that fits into an Altoid box and talks to your TV, the quick and concise intro to web scraping, and the GPS necklace that tells you the distance from home.
These things so cool that there's even discussions about how to build famously neat art works like Joo Youn Paek's zipper orchestra, Jin-Yo Mok's music box and so-called Zygotes that are, I swear, straight out of Diamond Age. No more mystery! Just good information, well-packaged and fun to learn.
If you're a programmer then the Processing language (built on Java) is easy. Also, the breadboarding is simple. This book speaks to the artist and inventor in every engineer's soul and, man, it's great.
Oh, oh, and I almost forgot - there are these great lists of companies to go to, and URLs, for buying all these nifty little gadgets.
Anyway, now I have to go get an RFID chip to tag my boyfriend so that when he comes home the house will recognize him and tell the X10 controllers what to do. Hmmm...
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