Looking for that perfect Christmas gift that will give your 6- to 14-year-old a taste of the most basic engineering principle — that you can change your world if you can dream it — and stir their creative juices while having a lot of fun? Look no further than ATOMS from the Boulder, Colo. startup Seamless Toy Co.
“We want to enable kids to make their toys do things and have fun at it,” Seamless founder Michael Rosenblatt told me recently. “We created ATOMS to fill the gap between the maker community and kids, to narrow the gap between what kids can dream up and what they can make.”
Got a stuffed animal you want to say meow when it’s picked up? ATOMS can do that. Got a Lego car you want to turn into a moving target for your Nerf gun and have it stop when it’s hit? ATOMS can do that. Want the lights in your dollhouse to turn on when you wave your magic wand? ATOMS can do that. Want to surprise your older sister with a pop-out-of-the-box jumping ball and then play her a recorded message if she steps through the door? ATOMS can do that. Want your iPhone to snap a picture when someone walks in front of a hidden switch? ATOMS can do that.
Each unit has a Lego-compatible footprint that can instantly turn any Lego kit into a smart toy that interacts with you, and that you can interact with. “ATOMS units can bring other toys to life.”
Seamless Toy Co. founder Michael Rosenblatt, holding a sensor-enabled Nerf gun, is taking aim at the toy industry by enabling kids
to “make their toys do things.”
(Source: Seamless Toy Company)
There are 14 different ATOMS elements that come in four color-coded flavors. Sensors are yellow, actuators are blue, smart power units are red, and logic elements are green.
ATOMS connect to one another over a three-wire cable carrying power and a seamless communications link.
“They just work right out of the box, no programming, just literally plug and play,” Rosenblatt said. “We designed each ATOM to allow kids to create things as fast as they can imagine them. Kids as young as six years old have figured out how to make ATOMS do things in less than five minutes. The most important lesson they learn is cause and effect.”
The sensors are an accelerometer, a control knob, an IR receiver, and a light sensor. The actuators are a motor, a spring-loaded popper, an earthquake shaker, an IR transmitter, an LED, and a sound recorder.
A central smart power unit with a rechargeable lithium polymer battery powers each unit. Some of these units also have a Bluetooth Smart interface that communicates with an iOS iPad or iPhone to allow ATOMS to control some phone functions and the phone to control collections of ATOMS.
The product line
ATOMS are the basic building-block elements. These can be purchased separately to augment toys or create something new.
Rosenblatt (center) and some members of his team with a collection of ATOMS and the four kits currently available.
(Source: Seamless Toy Company)
Seamless also offers four complete kits. The Quark series are interactive robots. The Bunsen set is a wheeled robot that reacts to light and control switches. The Pascal set is iOS enabled — it can have your phone take a picture when it detects an object, or it can be controlled remotely by an iPhone. The magic wand set is the brainchild of a team member who was afraid of the dark as a child. He dreamed of having a magic wand he could wave and turn off the room lights after he had gotten into bed. This set, equipped with an accelerometer sensor, lets any kid do this.
“After letting some of our young team members experiment with the ATOMS units, they insisted on a prankster kit to play pranks on siblings,” Rosenblatt said. “Each kit can be fully modified with additional ATOMS units to do whatever a kid can imagine.”
All these kits are available through the company’s website.
The company
Seamless began in October 2012 as a Kickstarter project that raised $183,000. After the success of the proof of concept, Rosenblatt received an additional $2.1 million in venture capital seed money from Avi Tevanian and his partner, Bono.
This was the brainchild of Rosenblatt, who received his MS degree from the MIT Media Lab and spent 10 years at Apple. Four years ago, he conceived the idea of interactive electronic building-block units that kids could use to create things.
He moved his family to Boulder “as the ideal environment to raise a company and raise a family.” His team of 20 is headquartered in downtown Boulder. The board assembly and final assembly are done in nearby Loveland, Colo. Vergent Products, the assembler, is in the same building in which Lego parts used to be manufactured before production was sent offshore.
The hardware design, electronics, and firmware were developed in April, and the first working units were built in the summer. Production is ramping up; volume shipments were expected to begin in late November.
A look under the hood
Each ATOM unit has three features: It is self-managing, it is self-indicating, and it communicates transparently to other ATOMS. The sensor units have visual feedback to show signal strength. When units are connected through Bluetooth to an iPhone, a virtual meter shows signal strength for any sensor.
Inside each unit is a small circuit board with an tiny Atmel microcontroller. Tradeoffs were made right at the beginning to keep costs down while making the system robust and expandable. Three wires are used to connect units, rather than two. The DC blocking capacitors that would be required to tap off data from the power lines were more expensive than adding the additional wire to the cable and custom connectors.
The microcontroller clocks on each board are RC based, rather than crystal. This means clock frequencies vary as much as 10% from unit to unit. This required more attention to the one-channel serial communications link that is bi-directional and asynchronous and avoids collisions. This was implemented in a propriety protocol with multiple UART channels between each ATOM.
Connecting between units is the same format three-wire-cable carrying power, ground, and the data line. Each ATOMS unit plugs into a power unit, which also communicates with the iOS app.
The power supply is Bluetooth Smart enabled with ports to power up to eight other units. (The assembled unit is inside the red box.) This circuit board is an example of one inside, with the two, three-wire custom cables attached and some diagnostics. The boards are assembled in Loveland, Colo.
(Source: Seamless Toy Company)
Pairing with an iOS device is done by proximity. The app and the ATOMS unit both respond with synchronized flashing lights confirming pairing.
“Of course, all of these details are hidden to the user,” Rosenblatt said. “The whole purpose of ATOMS is to remove the barriers for kids to jump into turning imagination into reality. It’s not about programming or soldering or circuit design. It’s about having fun.”
