handy cricket

What is the Cricket?

The Cricket is a tiny computer, powered by a 9 volt battery, that can control two motors and receive information from two sensors. Crickets are equipped with an infrared communication system that allows them to communicate with each other. Crickets are the result of cross-breeding our work on Programmable Bricks with the wearable Thinking Tag. Like the Brick, Crickets can be used for robotic applications, but because they are so small, Crickets can be used for other investigations like body-monitoring and data collecting.
The Cricket is based on the Microchip PIC series of microprocessor. User programs are downloaded to the Cricket via its infrared communications system. The Cricket has a button that when pressed triggers it to run the program that was downloaded to it. LEDs on the Cricket indicate when it is running a program or sitting idle, the state of the two motor outputs, and indication of infrared transmission.
Crickets are programmed in a dialect of the Logo programming language, a procedural language that includes constructs like if, repeat, and loop, global and local variables, 8-bit numeric operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparison), motor and sensor primitives, timing functions, a tone-playing function, and a random number function.
We have developed a variety of activities based on Crickets, as part of our Beyond Black Boxes NSF research:

• Crickets are small and light enough that they can be carried around in a shirt pocket, collecting data about body activities.
• A collection of Crickets communicating with each other to simulate natural life.
• A network of Crickets positioned in an indoor environment to collect and share data about human traffic patterns, room temperature variations, lighting preferences, and other dynamic qualities.
• Mobile, creature-like robots built on a smaller scale than was previously possible.

You can find out more about the technological infrastructure that runs the Crickets by taking a look at the

Technical Overview presentation. It is presented in form of talk slides from a May 29, 1997 Media Lab presentation.
The Cricket grew out of Fred Martin's work with Programmable Bricks. The Cricket project has had many contributors, but has been primarily created by Fred Martin, Brian Silverman, Bakhtiar Mikhak, and Robbie Berg.

The final countdown to start my Master Degree thesis

Today I gave the first step in preparing for my MSc Thesis with the creation of this blog. Here I will report the doubts, problems, solutions, research and other related items. A possible title for my thesis is "Programmable wiCrickets - Visual language and algorithm for robot collaboration and emotion programming". Stay tuned and return to this blog often!