During the last months we’ve been working on our skunk works project “Wruum”, which has now been made a bit more public on the web site www.wruum.com.

Do visit

Wow.

It can be quite daunting to look at the date of the latest post as I get to think about why we haven’t made a post recently.

Fortunately the lack of posts doesn’t reflect our level of activity but rather the skunk works nature of most of our latest work.

However, that doesn’t justify not updating the site when you have something new to tell, and thus the pages with information about our mission, technology and clients have now been updated.

Go have a look for yourself.

It’s been a while since the last post, but things have not been quiet around OhNoWire.

In the past year we’ve been working on various projects involving GSM/GPRS, Bluetooth and mobile devices + a special human interface device (HID) which is very home brew but working and fun to play with.

At the moment, we invest our time in some projects involving ZigBee technology, sensors, dot matrix displays and mobile phones.

As always, we think that what we do is both fun and interesting, and we hope that you’ll think the same. Watch out for more posts in the coming weeks…

Here’s our presentation from the Update08 conference.

Slides are in Danish, however very visual. So in case Danish is not your cup of tea, you might able to decrypt some of the info anyway.

OhNoWire presentation, Update 2008 (pdf)

Please note that the file size is 14 MB, so it might take a while to download.

Although we could spend ours talking about this subject, we have been given eight minutes at the Update 2008 conference to talk about “Det levende bybillede” (the mobile city map) - a working title for a platform for location-based and context relevant information.

With this platform, we wish to develop a new generation of mobile services, that will expand citizens’ ability to be up to date and informed on various activities, traffic information and sales or special offers, no matter where they are. Location based services and social interaction on mobile units will be at the center of attention in the future years.

At Update 2008 we hope to be able to expand your horizon, and not to arouse some interest among possible investors and/or partners.

We expect to have a prototype ready late 2008, and a beta version early 2009.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

March 13 we are heading of to the “Day of Inspiration” at VidenDanmark (Danish network for knowledge workers). Here we will be giving a presenation about some of the many possibilities that the new mobile technologies will give us.

We have about 20 minutes, which really isn’t that long (we could go on for hours!), but should be just enough time to cover the basics, and hopefully give the audience an idea of how the future will be with all these new technologies.

We would just like to say thank you to VidenDanmark for inviting us, and hope that we will be able to inspire our audience.

If you would like to hear more about our presenation, give us a call, and we will give you the short (or long) version.

Some days ago I received a package containing some electronic supplies. In the package were a handful of microcontrollers, various sensors, some LEDs etc. All the nifty tings that are fun to interconnect and send a current through.

But there was also a couple of dot matrix display, and that was the real killer for me. When I was a child at the age of about 8 to 12 years, I always dreamt of unpacking a brand new dot matrix display and connecting it to some of the gadgets that I were soldering together. I didn’t have the money (they were expensive back then) and I didn’t have the knowledge either, so I didn’t venture down the display avenue until much later.

So when I unpacked the display I got this special feeling that: “Wow, I am finally able to get hands on a dot matrix display and I’m able to connect it to the circuitry that I am working on”. It’s a little weird, because I’ve unpacked several displays and connected them many times since my youth, but the feeling persists.

While I could pass that feeling off and not think so much about it, I try and appreciate it instead. Appreciate the fact that I was longing so much for something that I’m now able to work with every day - and not least that I’m still able to feel joy doing so.

In this world it’s a privilege that one is able to work with something that is joyful.

Here at OhNoWire we work a lot with physical computing, i.e. developing and building interactive systems whose state and responses are determined by human input.

Of course, we are some kind of nerd species since we have begun working in the field of IT and electronics in the first place. I mean, we get kicks out of lines of software code and blinking lamps and buzzing noises.

For us, physical computing is about bringing out the fun of computing and electronics to ordinary people, and the key to how to do that is to make interesting and fun ways of interacting with the electronic gadgets.

Away from all the ordinary computer keyboards, digit keypads, push buttons etc. Enter touch-sensitive screens, video tracking of motion, location based services and “electronically enhanced toys” (filled with all kinds of sensors and wireless technology).

And physical computing and new interfaces are actually tickling the interest of ordinary people, it seems. They are interested in what the gadget will do if they move their finger to another touch field, their feet onto a different floor plate or their entire body just half a meter - and about what will happen if they whistle a tune or flip a cube filled with organic, pulsing lights.

Most technology in the future will be ubiquitous, no doubt about that, and more and more pieces of technology sport new interfaces.

So all in all, what’s cool about physical computing is that it proves that people may interact with technology in so many new and inspiring ways. That and many other, much more nerdy tings

We had quite a party here yesterday with the new Google Android that was released the same day.

Google Android is an open source operating system and development platform for all sorts of mobile devices. It’s based on the popular operating system Linux and can thus be expected to be able to run (or be made to run) on almost any hardware in the wild.

But Google Android is more than this. It comes with a variety of tools which should enable developers to churn out great applications for mobile platforms with more efficiency and less hassle than ever before. Not that every other operating system for mobile devices has been developed to be hostile to developers, not at all, but with Google Android it’s simply just open and with a lower barriers of entry: It’s free, documented and it’ll more than likely develop a broad eco-system around it as many other open source projects have.

Google Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 companies working in the fields of hardware, software and telecoms.

We welcome Google Android and we look forward to working with it for our projects. Both in a geeky manner and with regards to the fact that Google and the other members of the Open Handset Alliance bring new energy into the arena of mobile and embedded devices.

We’re working a handful projects, some of which are prospects and others which have been initiated, and it’s a lot of fun. And then we all know what often gets neglected… the web site.

But it’s not all bad as we should have some interesting projects and ideas to write about before long.

So we’ve not gone undercover nor are we sipping drinks on some exotic island in the tropics. We’re simply busy, which is at least as fun (for a bunch of work-a-holics like ourselves).