Time for gadgeteer [Resources_Hand On]

WE LIVE IN A HIGH-TECH WORLD, SURROUNDED BY NEW gadgets like smartphones and Internet TVs, along with other consumer products that were unheard of a decade or two ago. It's not surprising that we often overlook more established electronic devices. Take, for example, the humble alarm clock. Despite digital convergence, many of us still like a dedicated device that lets us know what time it is if we wake in the night and summons us to action in the morning. Sadly, alarm clocks appear to have fallen behind our other home electronics in their sophistication. So I decided to build a better one. · For this I used Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer, a platform I helped develop as part of my day job in the Sensors and Devices group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. Our work includes the SenseCam used at the heart of Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits project [see "Total Recall," IEEE Spectrum, November 2005]. As one of the few groups at Microsoft Research that creates new hardware, we designed Gadgeteer as a rapid prototyping system for our own needs. But we saw so much interest from others that we released it to the general public as an open-source platform in 2011. Several manufacturers now supply Gadgeteer hardware that works in conjunction with free-to-download software.