 I'm going to show you a little video first of what we're doing. A bit of luck. So this is a montage. You can see it's a physical radio device made of a Raspberry Pi with little speakers. It's a radio-like device, so it's not an actual radio. So I'm going to talk a bit about why we did it, why we thought it was a good idea, and what we're going to do next. So why radio? Well, we work for BBC R&D. The BBC does a lot of radio. We've got 10 national channels, something like 40 regional ones plus the World Service. So 48 million people listen to the radio every week. That's 90% of the audience. And as a group within R&D, we do a lot of experiments with radio. So here's one called Breaking Out. And this was a sort of, it detected where you were in the country and then started making custom additions to your, to a piece of content, a radio play, based on the weather in Bristol or wherever it was you were. So you played it on your computer and it started putting in rain and sound effects, for example. This is the World Service Radio Archive. So we've got thousands and thousands of video and we're crowdsourcing the metadata for it. But again, it only runs on your computer at the moment. And whenever we talk about this stuff to people and show it to them, they say, could we have it on a physical radio please? Because that's how we listen to the radio. So we're like, okay, we're web people, but we can do this. We'd like to look at hardware. We want to make a radio, we want to make a radio that's completely customizable that we can do whatever we want on. So you may have heard of the arches. It's a very, very long running soap on Radio 4. It's on every day, apart from Saturdays. A lot of people find it very annoying. A lot of people love it. I find it very annoying and my partner doesn't hear it. So this is the vision we started with. So you hear the hideous music. You click the panic button and you get something else. It doesn't matter what. And you don't have to listen to it. So a hardware hack day at work. Here's our initial view. I don't know if you can see properly. That's a farmer that gradually rises out of the box. And then you bash it down again to it. That one was a bit hard for an initial one. So here's the one we actually made on that day. It's got a Raspberry Pi attached to a little speaker. It's got a nice big red button that lights up. And you just press that and it changes channel. And then I found a friend in Bristol who could do laser cutting. And we laser cut this beautiful cardboard box. Again, the video is not working. But I'll show you. So this is the sound. So the reason I've been putting postcards rather optimistically on all the chairs here is because when we started to talk about this and a big part of this was in the Bristol Hack Space and talking to Richard and the people there is when you start to talk to people about radio they immediately start to go, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I do it is I'd add another button that dispenses bacon or something like that. That is an actual one. Anyway. So I drew a rough, very rough and ready. People don't like being faced with a blank screen. So I drew a very rough and ready square thing. That looks a little bit like a radio. We had some cheap cards printed from Moo and some nice stickers as well. So the idea is you can take a postcard, put some stickers on in appropriate places so there's knobs and dials and speakers and things like that, and then use that as the basis for your radio. So I tried this out about a year ago at an XML summer school and we got some great ones. So this one is Matt Patterson. He loves Melvin Bragg. He listens to Radio 4. So whenever something interesting is on the radio you click the button and it plays an in our time that is somehow relevant to whatever it was that just happened. This is a great one from my friend Paul. So it's a Humphreys rater. Anyway, so you give it a gentle stroke and that feeds back to John Humphreys about how lovely when he's being nice and then when he talks about science it gives him an electric shock. Probably won't do that one. The feedback to the presenters is an interesting idea. Here's one from my colleague Sean. So this is kind of quite similar to an arch. It's avoided a bit more general so you can have more of the thing that's happening or less of it so you can avoid it completely and it learns eventually what it is that you like and you dislike so you can avoid lots of different things with it. So now we've got about 120 of these things and some of them, they mean a lot to the people who've done them but we don't know which ones to pursue. And we don't know which ones will work for other people. But the idea is that if we make these things then we can turn them into real things then we can test if they're useful for multiple people. So that's what we did. So my colleagues Dan and Andrew worked on this and did most of the coding. So this is their magic button radio. So the idea is that it's just enough of a radio so that you can do it. Ashley, I've got some here, I'll show you. Just enough of a radio so that it's got a volume dial, you can turn it on and off, you can cycle through your channels and it also has a magic button. It also runs on it a web interface so all the complexity that you need to do custom interfaces is on the web server that's running on the device itself. So you can see here that the physical device and the web server are connected up so if you change a button that's reflected in the web interface. So it kind of has to be this way because if you're going to... It has to be this way because if you're going to put any kind of complexity in a radio you don't want to have to put a load of buttons on that people don't really understand but it's straightforward to add more functionality to a web page. So here's one. I'm sorry about these small technical problems. OK, so you can see here that it's got three functionalities for the magic button. In fact, this is a mock-up and it only has two. So for a first start, when you press the button you can either set it so it can avoid so you can avoid whatever you want. And we've got the metadata so if you press it it knows when the arch is finished or whatever it is that you've avoided and then it can restart again and you can also avoid specific tunes, for example, that you don't like. The other one is speak so we're very interested in accessibility. This seems like a really interesting opportunity to try and do something with it. The initial thing is you can set it so that when you press the button it tells you what's playing at the moment. It was supposed to tweak but it doesn't. So underlying it, we've basically got Rabbit MQ running, so an event bus so that changes in the physical interface are reflected in the web interface and vice versa. You can access the web interface from multiple different devices and so on. So here's the hardware. We've got a very good product designer called Victor Johansson to design the physical device for us. We wanted something extensible so we can make it different thicknesses. We wanted something with minimal gluing and that didn't need much expertise to put together so this is what it looks like. Here are the pieces or most of them and you can make it out of lots of different materials. So the initial one was made out of MDF with some plastic corner pieces all laser cut. We've been experimenting various different kind of acrylic cases and things like that. I really like the cardboard ones. They seem to work pretty well. So you don't need a laser cutter with this one here I have cut it out of some pieces of paper and you can sort of see what it looks like. This is one that just plays the arches rather than the reverse. Everything packs neatly inside ish as you can see there. So the important thing about it is that it needs to be on the web so it's not a real radio it streams internet streams because that's the only way we can make it configurable so it appears to be a radio device that plays radio but it does need to be on the web it isn't a proper radio so quite a lot of the time we spent just making sure it could get on the network effectively which turns out to be a pretty difficult problem. You can see inside it's got a couple of rotary encoders speaker, wifi it's a Raspberry Pi with a card we've used off the shelf hardware where we can to make it easy for us to for us to make them ourselves for people in the BBC to make their own and then hopefully other people too if it catches people's attention. So I've got a video for the wifi configuration sorry can anyone help me there we go ok so if it doesn't if it doesn't find a wifi network that it knows about it broadcasts one this is quite a common pattern so chromecast does it as well it broadcasts one you tell it your wifi details you reboot it and off you go and unless you made a typo it will then boot up into it I'm out of control help me there we go so now we've got the building blocks here so we've got wifi configuration to get it on there we've got an audio server which talks to MPD we've got the physical UI server that enables you to configure buttons and dials and things to do what you want we've got the prototype app which was the magic button thing that we showed you so that's just one thing you could build but it's an example of it we've got a client library which just interfaces between so it kind of uses the send things to rabbit MQ and back again it's a modular case and it's all open source including the case designs and everything like that and we're working in the open from the beginning so it's now in sufficient state such that a bodgyr like me can add in EMFM into there because it's just an internet stream and we can listen to it on the radio one of the next projects that we want to make is a version of the world service archive where you can pick what year you want to listen to and then just set it off going but in a physical case so the idea of all this was to make it so that people so that we could try out all the radios that people had made but in practice actually doing it takes quite a long time even with the tested software with the open source case and everything it just takes quite a long time to actually get one to work so recently we've been thinking a lot about shortcuts so can we take away some of these ideas and decide that they're rubbish ideas or that they're not suitable for taking further before we actually have to make a case so for a long time in the kinds of projects that I do it's a requirement to have a scenario so to think about the kinds of ways which people might use your technology so here's one from an EU project that we did a while back and here the idea is that Yana's listening to the radio there's something really interesting on there's visual material that she can that's synchronised with the programme so she can use another device and just see more information about it that enhances her experience of the content so the problem there though is that these scenarios don't test it against what people would actually do what they do is express your desire that people use the technology in this particular way we were working on a synchronisation technology we thought it was a great idea here's an example of why you might use it but actually maybe you wouldn't maybe you're just doing something else when you're listening to the radio and you don't really want to get out your phone or you could just use Google or something like that to find out more information so writing down scenarios like this aren't really that useful for testing ideas so this is some of the team that I work in I don't know if you can see it it's a bunch of people sat round a table with a lot of pretend devices made out of cardboard with little messages on pieces of paper saying what they're doing and what we were trying to test here is whether what the sort of user experience would be to send audio between different devices and what each device would say as soon as you did it and what we found was that if you act something out people you get a sense of what the problems are you get a sense of the holes and it's actually a really cheap way of doing it so we used bits of cardboard we thought about the messages that were going past it was a lot of fun but there was a very serious point behind it which is to not have to make all this stuff before you realise it's not going to work so recently Richard and I have been thinking about whether we can kill ideas more quickly than that all the making things out of paper and everything like that so this is a little bit experimental and it is early days but these are catwigs so the idea here is you have a set of cards and they're a little bit like tarot and you test your idea against them so for example this one is does your idea solve a problem is it as good as antibiotics? probably not is it as good as a garage door opener so it helps people a little bit it helps a few people a little bit a lot of technology ideas are like this a lot of apps are like this it maybe helps just a tiny tiny bit or is it just a catwig a catwig is something that nobody needs and nobody wants also it's just a great name so here's a few of the examples we've got we've been thinking about so does it make everything better in the world, does it help things or does it not change anything is it entertaining if you're trying to make something that's fun would people actually enjoy doing it or would it actually be a bit rubbish so is it as rubbish as a tax return as entertaining as a sitcom or really exciting like fireworks attention seeking so a lot of apps and similar things are very irritating so this is a kind of a test is it as annoying as an alarm clock or a phone call or is it just kind of an ambient a amount of attention and would you use it again so the three here are barium meal train station sandwich you'd have it if you have to but you wouldn't really voluntarily return to it or booze and six basically it's highly addictive so we've got a few of these and what it does is it initiates a conversation about your idea so you start to go actually this is supposed to be a social application but in fact it wouldn't happen like that or this is supposed to be let's see what's that one so this is supposed to be something that really changes the world but actually it's only going to help like five people so you start to say what you start to see what's wrong with the ideas so okay I'm going to finish up soon I've shown this to my colleague Andrew and he said this rather long thing here but basically he was saying part of the process of making these things is you find out a lot from actually doing them so you get these happy accidents you talk to different people you see it in various stages of construction people comment on it and then you just learn a lot so he's worried that we might accidentally kill off an idea that could be really good in the future using a catwig oops so it's possible but you do have to decide what you're going to work on so it's quite important to be able to use the resources that you have effectively and we think this is one way of doing it so I made it a little early which means that we can do we can make some radio postcards but before I do that I just want to say thank you to the open source community, to my colleagues and to tell you to have a look at our website and see if there's anything that interests you there and you can also ask me any questions if you like any questions? go to radiodan.net the last blog post explains how to it's got all the links you need to make it so it's a little bit experimental at this point but you can also email me if you get stuck so there's an image there there's the case designs for laser cutting and it should just work out of the box if you make the box any more? is it all long? because we use the NPD one of the things we wanted to do for example was make it so that you could favourite your stuff on Twitter it's very straightforward to get it to do there offline this is really interesting in that sense because there's a sense where let's say you're avoiding the arches you kind of want to swap something in to the right length that it thinks you'll like and it has information about what your business is would it feedback any information is like ratings information is that part of what you're interested in? I was wondering whether you are looking at evolving the design because you've looked at integrating a web app just thinking is there a lady named Shield because you might be able to kind of customise the radio interface I think that would be really interesting but pretty easy wouldn't we so it's really quite hard to do but thankfully Catwig Catwig into the vocabulary of you guys because of this talk I think that will be in a real some impact