[chbot] Book review "Making things talk" by Tom Igoe

[Andrew Errington]

Hi all,

I picked up this book at the library (they have 6 copies in various
locations) and browsed through it fairly quickly.  This is not an in-depth
review, but rather a short summary to bring the book to your attention.

"Making things talk" is not about talking (i.e. speech), it's about data
communication, i.e. making things talk to each other.  The book is very
practical, with plausible scenarios, good pictures, and well documented
code examples.  The code is generally targeted to the Arduino platform,
and the hardware chosen is often very specific, but there is enough
supporting information for the reader to generalise and extrapolate.

Topics covered include: Bluetooth, Zigbee, TCP/IP, UDP and other
communications protocols; GPS, infra-red, RFID and other sensors
(including webcams), plus a wealth of other interesting modules and
interfacing techniques.

I found the book to be very interesting, and very practical.  Although
each project was a little contrived, they were described fully, so that
anyone could actually go ahead and duplicate them, see how they work, and
then extend the functionality.

The only downside (in my opinion) was that most of the projects comprised
of gluing together two "black boxes", e.g. connect a digital compass
module to an Arduino board.  There is no discussion of the lower-level
module design, no schematics and no soldering.  Of course, dealing with
components might put a lot of people off anyway, so perhaps it's not a
downside.

What has it got to do with robotics?  Well, I would recommend this book to
give you ideas of how to interface a bunch of sensor modules to your robot
to help it navigate the outside world.  You might also get ideas on how to
communicate remotely with the robot using wifi, Bluetooth or Zigbee.  I'd
also recommend this book to artists and other creative people to give them
ideas of how to make their pieces more interactive.

3 copies of the book are out right now, but I'll be returning mine in the
next couple of days.

Best wishes,

Andrew