BUGgery
by Imran Ali
My dad was an electrician by profession, but even from childhood, he loved to take things apart and rebuild them into something new. An original tinkerer/hacker; when thieves stole a TV from Dad’s car, he designed and retrofitted an alarm of his own design; when we couldn’t install a doorbell to our aluminium framed front door, he designed and built a bell triggered by the opening of the letterbox. He’d love what the Bug Labs guys are about to launch…
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Bug Labs’ BUG product is something I’ve been jonesing to see for a couple months. BUG is essentialy an open source, modular consumer electronics platform that purports to making hardware design as easy as writing web applications.
The BUG system consists of…
- The BUGbase: a Linux-based computer with wifi, ethernet, USB, some onboard memory and rechargable batteries.
- BUGmodules: The company plans to offer GPS, cameras, touchscreen, motion sensors, keyboards and audio modules over the course of the next few months.
- Software: A combination of a software API and a developer community (BUGnet); I’m interested to see how Bug will enabled the various hardware components to be ’scripted’ together.
Open source hardware is nothing new - from my good friend Surj Patel’s Tuxphone project, to Trolltech’s Greenphone, the Chumby and Openmoko’s Neo1973 - but BUG’s moving beyond a single device made of open source components, to a series of hardware modules that can be combined and remixed into new device categories. BUG may represent the opening of the Long Tail of consumer electronics.
The implications on mobile communications are profound. What kinds of niche wifi messaging devices will BUG enable? Imagine the development of GSM, EDGE or 3G BUGmodules, leveraged by the BUGnet community?
Maybe BUG will enable my Dad to remix his car alarm with periodic texts asserting its GPS coordinates next time it’s stolen…
