BERG's Little Printer (left); Adafruit's Internet of Things Printer
London design firm BERG and New York open hardware shop Adafruit are two of my favorite companies. Both trade in big and small ideas about the future, but their projects rarely converge.
BERG mostly does high-concept video thoughtpieces. Adafruit sells do-it-yourself hardware kits. But people at both companies love little networked devices. So maybe it’s no accident that each would try to rethink something as ordinary as the printer — turning a workaday utility of the desktop age into something mobile and whimsical.
Yes, both devices are the epitome of cute. So who really cares if their formats are so tiny, they’re really only useful for printing out tweets, haiku and daily affirmations?
BERG first announced what it calls its “Little Printer” in November. The firm has since been giving demos of the device, but have yet to announce its price or a release date beyond “2012.”
It’s BERG’s first gadget, built on what it calls BERG Cloud:
Little Printer’s brain isn’t on a chip in its body, but on the Web where it can reach out and touch other Web-enabled services, and where we can provide updates and improvements without you having to install anything.
In your front room, Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router. It’s this same box that will enable our other planned products in the BERG Cloud family. There’s no PC required, your phone is your remote control.
We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It’s built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future.
Meanwhile, Adafruit’s “Internet of Things” Printer was just announced today. When I asked Adafruit’s Phil Torrone how he would compare the two devices, he replied, “Ours is shipping now and ours is open source.”
That’s not quite all there is to it:
It’s a $ 90 kit you build yourself. Forget plug and play; you solder this thing together. The Internet of Things printer doesn’t sync up wirelessly to the cloud; it attaches by an Ethernet cable to a computer where you instruct it to run code. Its brain really does live on a chip in its body, but one you completely control.
“We think this is a great way to learn how to a build a physical object that does something based on what you code/choose to trigger an action that’s online,” Torrone told me.
“It’s on my desk now,” he added. “I’m enjoying some specific tweets I want give to a friend later tonight.”
That’s what we might call a limited use case. Both printers are definitely still more adorable than directly useful. Who cares if we can’t precisely mark its value? It’s still hard to put a price on the ability to pull something out of the ether, hold it in your hands, give it to another person, and make them smile.
