Bloctopus: A Novice Modular Sensor System for Playful Prototyping

Tangible prototyping enables designers to rapidly iterate design concepts, gather feedback, and learn quickly from mistakes. However, when a higher level of functionality is needed with sensors, novices struggle with technical implementation. Existing novice electronics toolkits, such as Arduino, have lowered the threshold to electronic experimentation, but still require manual creation of circuits and software programming ability. We present Bloctopus, a modular electronic prototyping toolkit that allows direct electrical interfacing over USB, and physical interfacing with LEGO blocks. We present the stand-alone sensor model, where each module can directly interface with either a computer or microcontroller, using musical message passing over MIDI. We show that the modules can be programmed with a simplified data flow model in a web-based visual programming interface. Finally, we present a prototyping case study that demonstrates the expressivity of devices that can be created using LEGO pieces, combined with functional electronic modules.