Planet Arduino

It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear there are tens of thousands of web-connected cameras all over the world that are set to take the default credentials. Actually, there are probably more than that out there, but we can assure you that at least 70,000 or so are only a click away. With this project, [carolinebuttet] proves that it’s quite possible to make art from our rickety, ridiculous surveillance state — and it begins with a peephole perspective.

The peephole in your own front door grants you the inalienable right to police your porch, stoop, or patch of carpet in the apartment building’s hallway while going mostly undetected. In Virtual Peephole, the peephole becomes a voyeuristic virtual view of various corners of the world.

Slide aside the cover, and an LDR connected to an Arduino Micro detects the change in light level. This change makes the Micro send a key press to a Raspberry Pi, which fetches a new camera at random and displays it on a screen inside the box. You can peep a brief demo after the break, followed by a couple of short build/walk-through videos.

If you’re a peephole people watcher, put a camera in there and watch from anywhere.

Via Adafruit

Back from Wearable Futures in London, I’d like to share a project seen at the Futures 10 exhibition during the last day of the event as it opens up some of the complexities of the issue around big data, surveillance and wearables.

“Open Informant” by Superflux  attempts to confront the unsettling realties of surveillance in a networked age.  It’s composed by an app, a digital fabricated wearable container of an e-ink badge and it’s powered by Arduino Pro Mini. The Open Informant App scans your data looking for triggered words, containing a selection of those usually searched by state security services, and broadcasts fragments of  texts to the badge via bluetooth:

Using the body as an instrument for protest, the badge becomes a means of rendering our own voice visible in an otherwise faceless technological panopticon. By openly displaying what is currently taken by forceful stealth, we question the intrusive forms of mass surveillance adopted by democratic nations on its own citizenry, and in the process, shift the conversation around wearables from being about you and your body as machine, to the culture of machine intelligence and algorithmic monitoring.

The team working on it ( Jon Ardern, Yosuke Ushigome, Anab Jain) shared all aspects of the badge’s design and construction  on Github!