Phidgets

The concept of Widgets can be associated with physical devices.

Concept proposed by the GroupLab at the University of Calgary.

URL = http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/Phidgets.html

Description

"We can now build physical devices that can be attached to a computer by various means: serial ports, USB, or even wireless connections. However, these are usually hard to program because they typically require intimate knowledge in how these devices are built as well as their communication protocol. As an alternative, we believe that these devices can be packaged as a physical widget, or Phidget. As with conventional GUI widgets, the important idea of a phidget is that it presents the programmer with an easily used entity with a well defined interface, where details of how the entity is implemented is hidden away. This project was motivated by our work on Digital but Physical widgets." (http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/Phidgets.html)