With SAM, the Internet of Things becomes a child’s game
SAM completed its KickStarter campaign in 3 days, and just won 3 prizes at New York’s Maker Faire. This Internet of Things development kit allows you to forget about coding to design connected objects.
Will SAM do better than Arduino or LittleBits ? Belgian Joachim Horn, founder of the London based start-up offering the Internet of Things development kits is delighted by its KickStarter campaign’s success (more than 90,000 pounds promised out of the 50,000 asked, 10 days before its completion) : “The demand is high, he says to Makery (by Skype). Many people want to know but don’t have the means to access this level of knowledge. I think that’s what really drove the campaign.”
« We didn’t have any budget for marketing, the campaign depended on word of mouth. » Joachim Horn, SAM’s founder
Wireless and code-less
SAM’s promise is to provide a simple way to imagine and design connected objects able to react to light, to move or to shake, following a user’s presets, without the need to code. What makes SAM different from other development kits (in vogue on crowd-funding websites), is its interface which relieves users from the necessity of learning to code, as well as its module’s wireless (Bluetooth) communication mode. It’s possible to connect those modules (button, light, motor, thermometer, light sensor, cloud module…) between themselves and to the Internet without writing a single code line or fiddling any circuit board. Their interactions can be set up through a very simple software which translates ithe links created on the screen into code using drag and drop. But the regular coders can still edit the transparent Javascript lines.
This assembly can be connected to social networks and to various online services, in order to plan actions at the reception of a new email or a new “like” on a Facebook page, for example. So as to show the intuitive characteristic of the kits, SAM’s team, composed of designers from Royal College of Arts and engineers from Imperial College London, organised multiple workshops in its lab, open to college students and children for the occasion. Remote-controlled car, bubble machine, little robots… The possibilities offered by those module’s combination seem to be vast.
KickStarter’s presentation of SAM project :
On a hardware level, schematics and board designs will be published. This is not the case for the software, which remains proprietary for the moment. Over time, SAM is considering offering “premium” software.
SAM’s range is made of 4 kits, from the simplest counting 3 modules (£45, €57) to the most complete counting 12 (£200, €254). About 200 kits have been prefabricated, but KickStarter’s campaign should allow mass-production.
In their London based lab, provided by Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, Joachim and its team are preparing the future developments. Smartphone support (iOS, Android, Windows), casing design, accelerometer, LCD screen and camera modules are the next steps. First deliveries are planned for March 2015.