Went out to meet the Bug Labs team last night at the first of their Bug+BLANK events (where BLANK in this case was NYC+bar).

Bug Labs is a New York City based startup building an open source hardware platform. What does that mean? Their soon-to-be-released product is a modular set of hardware with open APIs that enables users (read: hackers, at least at first) to mix-and-match (mashup, if you will, but I understand if you won’t) hardware components to prototype and build all sorts of cool stuff.

The main board has a battery, wifi, Bluetooth, storage, and 4 adapters for external modules. They have 5-10 modules planned for launch, with 100 more in the roadmap. Example modules include: keyboard, screen, camera, GPS, RFID reader, accelerometer, video encoder/decoder, mp3 player, etc. All of the modules expose a REST interface so developers can code to them. How friggin’ cool is that??

The first example someone mentioned was a screen, keyboard, GPS, and camera that can be used as a mobile photoblogging tool. My first idea was to make a dashboard GPS device that integrates with Google Maps and is optimized for bike lanes and not highways that I can mount on my handlebars. One of the Bug guys was talking about compiling a version of MythTV and building a customized set top box. And my friend David can use an actuator module to fulfill his dream of creating a refrigerator door that live-blogs it’s daily openings and closings to RSS. And his other dream of attaching mini webcams to windmils and the big arms that go up and down at the toll booths and broadcasting the images live to neighborhood bars.

What’s exciting to me is that Bug really wants to build a platform and ecosystem around their hardware. So I can make my own one off device (say, the windmill webcam) or produce & sell really useful ones that have lots of appeal to enough people to resell and make money (say, NYC bike lane GPS device) but not enough appeal to have Samsung start manufacturing them en masse.

So I wish these guys the best of luck and I can’t wait to start hacking around with one!

Update: ooh! a picture of me at the event: