The Playpower team gave by far the most dynamic on the spot demo I saw at ETech 2009 - for more pictures see here, and for more about their presentation here:

"Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and has minimal access to education. The Playpower Foundation is using a radically affordable $12 computer, based on an old video game console technology (now in the public domain) as an 8-bit platform for learning games. Global poverty meets 8-bit design constraints--with only an open source community of 8-bit hackers in the middle?"

Also check out this excellent Wired article on Playpower by Priya Ganapati.

"Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs" said Brady Forrest in this post. I did. And it was very exciting to actually get hands-on with the Arduino opensource electronics prototyping platform, and Processing - a very accessible language to do dynamic and interactive graphics for screen-based media, in Tom Igoe's, Hands-On RFID for Makers workshop. You'll know how much I love to write and theorize about these things if you have checked out my long form blog Ugotrade.

 Unbelievably, in just three hours, I made my first RFID to web interface that could read Brady's elegant RFID tags (also see my photo set on Flickr to get a glimpse of the action in the workshop). Amazingly it worked perfectly first time (full disclosure I did have help from the very patient executive editor of Maker Media Books, Brian Jepson. And Tom Igoe's step by step instructions on his website are invaluable.

See the photo of my build here. It is sitting on the right of my workshop neighbor Ahmed Riaz's laptop. We shared power supplies and a great discussion on User Experience Design sketches - see Ahmed's blog here and his flickr stream. I have reposted here one of my favorite UX sketches done by an eight year old, especially for Ahmed.

If you look closely at this picture you will see that Ahmed's RFID to web interface has read my Etech RFID tag and pulled up my Etech conference profile, including picture.

In the evening, Tom Igoe announced during his Ignite presentation that an Arduino MEGA will be available next week - more pins, more ports, more memory.

I think I've gotten hooked on Maker culture - I can't wait to check out the Etech Maker Shed that opens today. I got a feel for the excitement of rapid prototyping in the morning doing the LilyPad Electronic Fashion workshop with Leah Buechley, a brilliant and patient teacher.

There was some mega talent in the Lilypad workshop. The Wattzon team, Raffi  Krikorian and Jeremy Cloud, and Wattzon-phile Tom Igoe stitched and ironed (see my Flickr stream here), and helped out noobs like me. Possibly we will see some programmable T-Shirts displaying carbon footprint data. But certainly you can use Wattzon to compute the embodied energy data of all the Lilypad components.

 I was a little hampered by my appalling needlework skills. But Maker culture came to the rescue when I twittered about needlework phobia and Lilypad love. @dpentecost replied in seconds inviting me to "sew and tell" at a NYC Lilypad meetup when I return to NYC.

(download)

Click here to download:

Making_a_RFID_to_Web_Interface.zip (2.17 MB)

I found this drawing on the Clear Night Sky blog. Igor Gasowski saw this picture by a second grader at an art exhibit at one of his kid’s schools. To get a feel for the possibilities for change please take the, “What You Want Machine,” for whirl. Gasowski suggests:

Just pour yourself a drink, light up a cigar and ponder the implications of the “What you want machine.” Can you even imagine how your life [and the world] would change?

Gasowski also notes:

I also want to compliment the artist on the user interface. Given the benefit it delivers… It’s an exercise in restraint.