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Handy Cricket
For my birthday, I got a Cricket.
I found the Cricket last year (Autumn 2001) when I was looking for MIT Handyboard links. There was a picture of a prototype driving a very small Lego car. I fell in love: Two motors and two sensors were al I needed for proects like Ria, and the smaller profile looked as if it would make everything more flexible.
I emailed Fred Martin to try and get the password for the schematics, but he told me that he was then in the process of commercialising it. One change of employment later, I finally re-established contact with him and ordered a "Handy Cricket". Sue counted it as part of my brithday present and thus I could get it into the house without it being classified as more junk. Handy Cricket is smaller than the RCX (in fact it was the tiny buggy on Fred's site that first caught my eye), it's well supported and there's not the feeling of dread as you take a hacksaw to a finely engineered RCX. If you're reading this in the US and have a just little more than 'shake-the-box' experience, I commend the system to you.
I started with a Cricket version of Ria. Since Sugar was not the world's greatest success, I felt okay calling it Sierra, after the Lartigue monorail operated by the phosphate company of the same name. I intended to package a set of small sensors in Lego bricks, and use the same basic Ria design, only smaller. However, from the UK I encountered some problems, and Sierra was never finished.
Cricket, as I said, is both more and less than the RCX. Crickets can talk and recognise each other. They can exchange information. This is getting back to stuff I did at school and at university, as well as the "nearest neighbour" computing I was doing in the mid 1980s. In the 1970s when I started in the IT industry, we needed these techniques just to make things work, nowadays they're used to build up complex behaviours from simple, cheap devices. Cricket is really neat. At first sight it looks more limited than the RCX, but it's fairer to say that it has a different emphasis. The Cricket system kind of assumes that several crickets will communicate – perhaps toys will swap information and gradually change their 'personalities' as they meet new crickets. I started hacking around the MIT sites like "Tangible Bits", and found some stuff on their collaborative computing projects.
I did a lot of thinking about how one might use Cricket in a Ria-like device to do ball-sorting or run to a timetable like my potential 'Cuddle' track. However, it got very busy in the summer and the thinking never progressed much further than getting Lego motors to work with the cricket. When I came back to it, though, I discovered a drawback with working with Cricket in the UK. The suppliers are a pleasure to do business with, but the turnaround and shipping costs wipe out most of the flexibility and cost advantages.
I'd intended to make a go of a wooden version of Sierra as well, intending to steel myself to throw away a number of part-completed models. I hope to get there soon, but by a different route. PicAxe is a UK-based pic microcontroller system I'm looking into, and I'll report as I go.