After meeting with a number of fellow grad students who are working on course projects for Walter’s CMPUT 607 – Introduction to Human Computer Interaction course, I realized that I have been recommending a number of textbooks and manuals to people starting in HCI/with DIY-projects, but I don’t have a central place where people can view them. As I order most of my books from Amazon or Chapters (whenever they have them!), I have added a ‘My Recommendations’ widget to my blog. Currently, the recommendations are all based around books that I use all the time (on Arduino’s (my new ‘it’ thing) and interaction), but I will switch out books whenever I discover new must-have’s!

If you are starting with the Arduino and electronics for the FIRST time, I highly recommend Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino book. I also recommend Noble’s Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and Openframeworks for anyone new to human computer interaction, motion tracking, basic computer vision, Arduino, processing, etc. Both of these books provide many tutorials, code examples, and pictures. They also are written for beginners and people who aren’t technical, who maybe don’t know how to code, or who don’t know what a sensor is. I found the approaches taken in these books to be very helpful when you are first learning.

As I am giving a shout-out to the books that I love to use for my projects, I also think it’s important to share the links to the various sellers/websites that I order components, Lilypad parts, and Arduino boards from. All of the websites below ship to Canada!

• Sparkfun: I can’t even tell you what I would do if Sparkfun didn’t exist. They sell everything Lilypad and Arduino that you could ever need, have a great list of user-submitted projects, code examples, and tutorials, and have reasonable shipping to Canada.
• Adafruit Industries: I just found Adafruit two weeks ago and started following them on twitter, but they have a very unique set of products available and I already received my first shipment of a very exciting product I will post about later. Really great Twitter feed and jobs section that just started up.
• Sparkle Labs: I found this place three weeks ago from a blog post on Gizmodo about Gizmodo University. Aside from their very good DIY Electronics Kit, they sell some cool parts such as pink LEDs, rainbow LEDs, and a solar cell. They also have very quick shipping to Canada.
• RobotShop: A Canadian company that sells actual robots, as well as a number of sensors and actuators, including some really weird things such as a Flame Sensor! Lots of breakout boards for Arduino.
• Phidgets Inc.: An Alberta-based company that sells Phidgets, which are like much more precise, high-tech Arduino’s. Phidget’s sample at a much faster rate than Arduino’s, making them perfect for research projects. They sell a number of I/O boards that you can use with virtually any sensor, as well as a number of sensors, motors, switches, LEDs, etc.
• Coolight.com: My resource for all things Electro-luminescent wire. EL Wire is cheap and looks super awesome. My favorite example of EL wire are the Daft Punk EL Wire costumes. They have good customer service and reasonable shipping to Canada.
• Maker SHED: Although I haven’t ordered from Maker SHED in a while (mostly because Sparkfun/Adafruit carry many of the same things), this website is a great resource for books, kits, Make Magazine, and those awesome little BristleBots!

Happy DIY-ing!