A Clever Kit That Makes Hardware Hacking Dead Simple

[Aerosol]

Technology is easier than ever to use—tablets could come with stickers that say “suitable for ages 8 to 88,” and that probably wouldn’t be inclusive enough. Making stuff, however, remains daunting. To build software, you have to know how to program. To build hardware, you have to know how to solder. Or at least that’s how it feels most of the time.

But we’re starting to see what user-friendly making looks like. IFTTT lets anyone link apps and services by stringing simple recipes together. LittleBits brings Lego-like simplicity to electronic tinkering. A new DIY kit called Mesh combines elements of both. Pairing a few simple sensors with a straightforward tablet interface, it lets anyone experiment with connected hardware ideas of their own.

Mesh, created by a small team of Japanese engineers from Sony, aims to make hardware hacking instantly accessible. Three domino-sized “tags” comprise the hardware: an accelerometer, a button, and an LED. They communicate wirelessly with a tablet app, which serves as a Quartz Composer-style visual sandbox for linking the hardware tags to various actions. Drag the icon for the accelerometer and the icon for the LED icon into the app’s workspace, draw a link between the two with your finger, and that’s it. Now, when you jostle the accelerometer, the LED turns on, wherever in the room it happens to be. Move the link from the LED to an “email” icon, and the accelerometer sends a preset note to your inbox instead.

The projects Mesh’s developers show off are, admittedly, silly. In one, we see how putting the accelerometer tag on a free weight could trigger an audio message encouraging you to keep pumping iron. This is not exactly the most compelling vision for our effortlessly programmable future.

But when Takehiro Hagiwara and Shingo Yoshizumi, two of the Sony engineers working on the project, brought a prototype set by for a demo, it was easy to see the promise. Hagiwara said the idea was to make inventing intuitive, and it was. While I certainly wasn’t building any sort of elaborate prototype, or, honestly, anything useful at all, the simple act of specifying a behavior on a screen and seeing it instantly adopted by the tags was kind of magical.

Hagiwara and company are raising money on IndieGogo to continue developing the platform. Though the examples position it as more of a neat toy at this point, the team has a fourth tag—a general input/out module–that would allow advanced tinkerers to incorporate servos and other hardware. The team also aims to link Mesh to other software and web services, which could open up many compelling possibilities. It would be awesome to have a few cheap, physical sensors that could be linked up to stuff on IFTTT, for example.

If nothing else, Mesh is a glimpse of what tomorrow’s creative tools might look like. And rethinking those tools more broadly is relevant to novices and pros alike. Loren Brichter, the programmer behind the original iPhone Twitter app, recently described the state of programming thus: “It’s not like a boat with a couple of holes that we can patch; it’s more like trying to sail across an ocean on a pile of accrued garbage.”

“The tools right now are so complicated that it takes all your mental energy just to try and ‘hold’ them,” he said, “so you have nothing left to actually do something interesting.”

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