IBMblr PLAY!

Yearning for the days of your youth, when playtime was all of the time? Bring play back! Through play, we try new things, problem-solve, create and learn how to make stuff even better. Play opens our minds to what’s possible and helps us make it happen. It sparks innovation and scientific breakthroughs by unleashing our curiosity and letting our imaginations run wild. So put your routine away and come out to play for a while. There’s room in the IBMblr sandbox for everyone. #IBMblrAtPlay

You say engineering, electronics, high voltage, and pyrotechnics; we say, the one and only Prince of Play, John Cohn. There isn’t much this IBM Fellow hasn’t dabbled in in the names of Science and Play. Take “Floorish,” the interactive floor he created for Burlington’s Firehouse Gallery in Vermont. By using Kinects, it lights-up in response to gallery visitors’ foot movements. It also lets you control the lights from your mobile device or desktop (have a play here). Other creations that have earned him nerd cred the world over: a gigantic pneumatic Pumpkin Robot, a humongous Mobile Art Car for Burning Man, a giant ‘touch sensitive’ keyboard for Phish bass player Mike Gordon.

The PLAY Machine— It’s alive!

The target’s been reached. The curtain, drawn. So what’s this strange contraption before you? Behold the IBMblr Play Machine (best viewed on desktop and tablet) – the spirit of innovation, playfully captured in a collection of nuts, bolts, gears, popcorn, laser beams, Arduinos, IBM Cloud software and more.  All designed for you to play with. No really. See what happens when you do: Like or Reblog. Follow or Share. Or tweet the magic hashtag, #PlayMachine and watch it get busy. We’re STREAMING LIVE, so you can see it all happen, as it happens, on your computer or tablet.

Give it a whirl, pop or chop now →

With every IBMblr reblog, the Play Machine’s hand adze raises up a notch, that much closer to — WHACK! — a forceful 72 pounds per square inch blow of the 3/8″ poplar wood dowel below. How’s it work? A custom API pulls your Tumblr reblog and sends it through IBM’s MQ Light messaging software. Next, a local machine tells the hand adze’s lifting mechanism to spring into action.

Reblog a post now and watch the dowel get what’s coming to it! →
(best viewed on desktop + tablet)

Our Play Machine takes globetrotting to a whole new level – one powered by play and robotic motors. Every share is pulled from the Twitter API or from Tumblr, which starts the globe a-spinnin’. Meanwhile, the longitude and latitude from a sharer’s location is sent to the globe’s arduino microcontroller to figure out where the 2mm laser should point – which if actual Earth size would be quite a ray, spanning a 28 mile radius. A command is sent to the motor controller in G-code and voila! (look, a share from France!), the world sees your location on the globe and the spinning LED fan!

Show us where you’re playing with a Share now →
(best viewed on desktop + tablet)

If your inner geek is wondering how our Follow machine does its thing, read on: From your Follow click on Tumblr, a message wings its way to a Softlayer server in Washington D.C., which then pings it over to the NYC-based Play Machine’s computer running MQLight messaging program. This program determines which thermal printer to use (based on the first letter of the username), then zips the name over to the Arduino controlling the printers. Said Arduino then tells the printer to print your username.  You guys sure do cover some ground.  Welcome to IBMblr!

Say hello to a newbie Follower now →
(best viewed on desktop + tablet)

What in the world is this all about? Watch LIVE on our spinning PLAY Machine globe and see. Every time someone shares an IBMblr post to Twitter or Facebook, the Earth starts spinning—until it reaches the sharer’s exact location and beams down a ray with laser precision. Then keep an eye on the spinning LED wheel for your city’s special shout-out. Or tweet out #PLAYmachine to give your @twitterhandle a whirl.

Share the love of PLAY →
(best viewed on desktop + tablet)

They say sharing is caring, but this month, it’s also about chopping and slicing. Because when you share any of our posts, you set the PLAY Machine’s hand axe in motion. By ‘in-motion’ we mean a chop, chop chopping kind of motion. Will you be watching when this razor sharp blade makes its deciding blow?

Go to our LIVE tumblr webcam (on desktop and tablet) and see →

Stay tuned for more digestible tech tidbits—some you can even cook up yourself: because Watson and Bon Appetit have been in cahoots and have some concoctions to share with you very soon, here on IBMblr.

T’was a few weeks before Christmas and IBMer Matt Ganis thought it’d be fun to let his blog followers control his office tree’s lights over the Web. So with his Raspberry Pi computer, a webcam, some crafty fswebcam coding and a flurry of ingenuity, he got busy. It wasn’t long before his followers were hitting the ‘on’ and ‘off’ buttons on his site, making his tree the most festive display in his office. In the spirit of Christmas and PLAY, Matt’s tree is up again and ready for you to tinker with over the holidays here. Who needs store-bought strings of blinking lights when you have the power of play at work?

Yes, folks, our three week Livestream feed has finally come to an end.. So what happens next for “this giant human cat toy” (nice tweet @creepil_ne)? Stay tuned… In the meantime our Tumblr playdate is far from over. There’s more in our Innovation Through PLAY series to come.