Making Things Talk

By Tom Igoe

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world can be fun, but when your homebrewed creations start talking to each other, things get really interesting. In Making Things Talk, author Tom Igoe, arts professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts, bestows the power of communication upon your favorite tech creations through simple projects that present the guidelines for electronic verbosity. Whether its microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases, Igoe demonstrates the ability of electronics to interact in fun and interesting ways.

Making Things Talk is ideal for “techies,” but also serves as a primer for people with little technical training.

“The workbenches of hobbyists, hackers, and makers have become overrun with microcontrollers—computers-on-a-chip that power homebrewed video games, robots, toys and more,” says Igoe. “This book contains a series of projects that teach readers what they need to know to get their creations talking to each other, connecting to the web and forming networks of smart devices.”

Igoe teaches courses in physical computing and networking at ITP and is co-author of the book Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers, which has been adopted by numerous digital art and design schools around the world.