1) Name: Jon Slenk.

2) Where yer at: I'm living in Silicon Valley.

3) Main topics of interest: computer art, video games, having a laid back company which can employ all my friends to do whatever they want, and maybe not raping the earth so much.

4) Projects. Please answer at least the following for each...

A1) Project Title: Black Box

A2) Project Purpose (super quick description): individual hardware units which can be connected together to make larger systems. quick and dirty hardware design system. designed around a simple microprocessor / single board computer that has lots of I/O stuff built in (BASICstamp, etc).

A3) What You've Accomplished so far: talk, talk, talk

A4) What's Next: research the market - what kind of system would people really find useful, affordable, fun? what is already out there, and what is it like?

A5) Who is Involved: me. maybe i can plumb friend's heads for helpful criticizm and ideas.

A6) Relevant References: LEGO, Capsella (thanks, nate!), Midnight Engineering Magazine.

A7) Who/What You are Looking for: hardware hackers

-- email excerpt --

okay. in an attempt to put something on the table for the usual "man, we gotta have our own company" comment, i'm going to tell you all about my black box project. you should read it, think about it, and write back to me. that would be good. cool.

actually, the idea isn't entirely mine. it was pretty much created by myself and also mike holling, a very cool, smart computer dood noize rock star (and then mark yeck and also kurt had input). we were sitting around talking about those cool single board computer things, or PICs, or microcontrollers, whatever the hell you want to call them. we figured it would be cool if these little devils could be made to do some really simple, cool thing, and then you could string them together to make a bigger, even cooler thing! like lego or capsella, only for 1s and 0s.

thus was born the idea of the black box hardware prototyping system. you come up with a network interface or bus for these little devils, so you can plug them into one another and have them chat. then, you come up with a bunch of different simple functionalities for these computers. then, you make like 10 of each of those. then, you can mix and match them to make them do a) fun b) useful things.

we sort of came up with some ideas for what these little monkeys could do individually: terminal concentrators, serial line monitors, lcd displays, mega muxes, pla things, storage devices / buffers (box stuffed with sram?), motor controllers, various and sundry sensors... basically, i don't know enough about hardware to know what would be useful so i can't recall everything, duh.

uhm, so what i need to do is to get some people familiar with hardware to think about this idea and tell me:

we also thought that we could market this stuff pretty well if the idea was good to begin with, and then implemented well enough. what you could do is sell kits that had a sampling of the basic building blocks for hobbyists, or to whet people's appetites - they could order specific modules - they could get a black box programmer where what you do is take a black box that just has i/o and then download a functionality to it (this wouldn't work for modules that required special hardware on board, no duh). etc. designer colors. :)