Pin&Play: Bringing Power and Networking to Wall-Mounted Appliances

The classic obstacles in the digital augmentation of everyday objects and appliances are usually situated around batteries, communication, size, and weight. Wired communication is often not possible, changing or charging batteries is generally considered a nuisance, and augmenting an appliance is usually not worth it if it means increasing its size or weight. For the subclass of devices an objects that are typically attached to surfaces such as walls and boards we consider surface augmentation to address this problem. We present several implementations where low-cost wallpaper, consisting of insulated conductive layers, provides both power and a networking bus to common devices like pins on a notice board, wall switches, lights, and thermostats. They can be placed and replaced at will in any orientation, while the attachment to the wall supplies power and networking as a bonus. Moreover, our prototypes show that this doesn’t affect familiarity of the objects, which makes interaction with them a breeze.