Just imagine having the job title: ‘Toy Engineer’. Beneath the surface, everyone knows you are a mechanical engineer, however, ‘toy engineer’ just sounds better. Mario Morello and Peter Spence, co-founder and inventor of Tio, wear the badges of ‘toy engineers’ with pride.
They have launched an app called Tio that uses a programmable square block that is the “first motorized building block that makes anything smart.” Showing off the practical use of this block (which you can see in this video on Forbes.com) shows that you can repurpose old toys, Go Pros and anything that could be turned into a portable, mobile toy. The idea is that you could mount the blocks – through sticky tabs or the magnetic mount – on whatever you could potentially drive around your living room and it will turn it into a connected, mobile vehicle.
The engineers from Tio say that multiple blocks can be coupled together and can work in unison, using the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) that will be connecting appliances to each other and ensuring they speak to each other. The blocks can be controlled from the Tio app on a smartphone.
Check the video below to see how it all works: