WARNING:
The setup is a prototype. There are better ways of doing it. If you can't get it to work, we can't really help you much. You are working on your own risk! Consider yourself warned.

1. Soldering / electronic skills
This first generation of TileToy is a working prototype. Before ordering any relatively expensive parts and trying to make the tiles, please understand that you need good skills in soldering and basic understanding of electronics for troubleshooting your circuit. Soldering TileToy is not the simplest task since we don't have a printed board circuit yet meaning you have to make all tedious wiring yourself. Naturally you can make your own printed board design and make it easier for yourself.

2. Running / making games
Making the games you need to understand serial communication, how to send and interpret strings of serial, asynchronous data. If you use our Max patches, you need Max/MSP from cycling74.com, free runtime version is enough for running the patches, but you need the license for making your own. There is a fully working 30day trial available. You can also communicate to tiles with any software that interfaces with your serial port. You need also a serial to radio frequency module, sending in 869 / 914Mhz at 19200 baud 8N1. We are using active robots telemetry module: RF Serial Board (USA 900MHz)
http://www.active-robots.com/products/radio-solutions/radio-communication.shtml

3. Cases
At the moment we can't provide any plastic boxes / red perspex for the tiles, you have to find something similar yourself. Cheap and dirty way of making the box would be from foam board, cardboard or plastic sheet if you have the tools for that. If you happen to find perfect box from shops, please tell us as well. Dimensions come from the led screen size and from the height of the screen + circuit + batteries. Our plastic box is 64*64mm from the top and 45mm high.

4. Expenses
With current components, ordered from farnell.com (expensive) one tile costs about £60 (90€ / 105$), where the screen module is about £20, radio almost as much, next comes batteries, reed switches and magnets all around fiver, pic chip is about £1.50 and the rest are more or less pennies. You need two tiles to make simple games, 3-4 is ideal with this version. The telemetry module is about £40 and then you need a Max/MSP software or skills to make your own patches with puredata, processing, director, java or any other software capable of serial communication via serial port. For programming the pics you need a pic programmer (£20-50) and PicBasic compiler (search for free pic basic compilers).

Checklist once more:

1. you must be confident in soldering and understanding the circuit for debugging it

2 you need to find the components yourself

3. you need a pic programmer and pic basic compiler

4. you need serial to radio frequency module / telemetry module (check above)

5. you need a software talking to you radio module in your serial port (MaxMSP patches available)

6. you need understanding in asynchronous serial communication for making games


:: Why to even bother then?
Even if you find the games and plays with the tiles limited, just making them will teach you the basics of wireless radio communication with controlling software. This knowledge can be used for various purposes. You can quite easily turn a tile into an wireless instrument, add an accelerometer and it detects shaking and tilting and sends the data to computer running sound software for instance. Make your own wireless hardware interfaces or use the radio chips for inter application communications.

Still, TileToy is our first little finger play in this domain, and we like to share the process. Nothing more. It's not very good product at the moment, it might be at some point. And there is plenty more where that came from, so we are not devoting the rest of our lives for TileToy only.