Blinky blocks: a physical ensemble programming platform

Authors:
Brian T. Kirby;Michael Ashley-Rollman;Seth Copen Goldstein
Affiliations:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Venue:
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2011

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Abstract

A major impediment to understanding programmable matter is the lack of an existing system with sufficiently many modules of sufficient capabilities. In this paper we describe the requirements of physically distributed ensembles and discuss the use of the distributed programming language Meld to program ensembles of these units. We demonstrate a new system designed to meet these requirements called Blinky Blocks and discuss the hardware design we used to create 100 of these modules.