There have been a few people asking us to do our full teardown of a crowdfunding campaign, this time for Bleen. We’ll get to that, but here’s the TL;DR version: 208 people just threw money away, and right now Indiegogo is ~$3000 richer for doing nothing.
Insipired by a Hacklet, [Chris] documented his retro console build. He started out like most people do with a Raspberry Pi, but found emulating newer consoles like the N64 consumed too much processor time. He moved his build over to custom-assembled hardware with an AMD Micro-ATX board, a drive, and a USB gamepad. It’s beautiful, and much, much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
SD card in your Pi died? Of course it did. The problem is you’re not shutting down your Pi correctly. [satya] whipped up a quick project to fix that. One button, a bit of Python, and a shell script is all you need for a one-button shutdown for your Raspberry Pi.
A while ago, [Jan] built an ARM-based modeling MIDI synth that sounds a lot like the old Junos of the 80s. It’s build around the one 8-pin DIP ARM that’s being manufactured, placed between a MIDI jack and a 1/4″ jack. That’s pretty much all the components. [Gritty] plugged it into a Teensy that’s connected to a sequencer. It sounds awesome.
Everyone loves the Spark Core – there are a few floating around the office here. Now there’s a new Spark. It’s called the Photon, and they’re packaging it as a module. There’s an STM32F2 microcontroller and a BCM43362 Wi-Fi transceiver packaged in a nice, FCC certified module. Very cool.
“…with a metasurface which projects the images that coming from the space-time light modulator.” – From an image on the Bleen page.
It’s not that you deserve to lose $200 if you funded that… but maybe you do.
I wonder if Max Pavlov, the CTO is a relation of Mr Pavlov? Hopefully he remembered to leave some food out for the dogs before leaving to work with Bleen.
Meta surface = layer(s) of fog.
Other technobabble: DLP projector.
Yes they’re throwing a bunch of useless terms around.
Sound like someone upgraded the old Mission Statement Generator or a Star Trek Techo Babble Generator into a Kickstarter Scam Generator. Suckers born everyday :(
http://cmorse.org/missiongen/
That Bleen scam literally includes the phrase “a metasurface which projects the images that coming from the space-time light modulator”. I’m pretty sure I heard that in one of those Turbo Encabulator videos…
I think that means they are using a DLP. Should make a nice projection on the roof.
Everything I read makes it sound like they’re using a fog machine and a DLP projector. And I read everything.
You make it sound like they’ve actually put something together..
It’s not that hard to slap a fog machine, an upward-facing fan, and a pico projector into something that size.
Of course, that’s a horribly distorted image, not true volumetric projection…. then again, they’re not claiming to have volumetric projection by any means (:
Also, I’m pretty sure the photoshopped the Bleen logo onto the people in their group photo.
Sorry, can you guys put the link for Chris’s console?
Thank you.
Added to the article
$19 for one photon… nice price! Though shipping to europe is $10 :/
STM32F2 microcontroller and a BCM43362… sounds like it’s extremely similar in hardware terms to the Electric Imp, which uses the same Broadcom Wi-Fi core… except hopefully this has a lot more openness in terms of how you can use it, which was always the big let-down with the Imp platform.
Link for Chris’ retro console build?
+1
I added the link to the article – but just for prosperity, here it is: http://entropyprojects.blogspot.com/2014/11/budget-retro-gaming-console-build.html
“posterity”
maybe there is a kickback!
At least that photon should get there at the speed of light for 19$
the Bleen thing seems like a pretty good example of why technical literacy is so important
“SD card in your Pi died? Of course it did.”
I have cut power to mine over 100 times without any issues while trying to reproduce the problems people have reported. What is actually corrupted?
yeah – people seem to have an impression that is different than my experience as well. I have a pi in my pool house controlling the pool pump and sprinkler system, near a mostly open pail of chlorine tablets, with no case, no climate control (in Phoenix – the temperature in there gets up to 120F quite often in the summer) and it has survived dozens of ‘unexpected’ power downs. It has been running flawlessly for well over a year – probably closer to two.
In my case, the system suddenly displayed the usual scenes found on a system that’s rapidly running the fsck functions. It rapidly ran it and couldn’t recover the disintegrating file system. Ultimately I ended up pulling the card and fully erasing it and then writing a freshly downloaded image to it. It is a case of one in two hundred thousand happenings.
Now the card and system works.
BLEEN – Nothing says scam better than this line from their FAQ “Finding contributors (marks) for our venture (scam) is about finding the true believers (gullible idiots) rather than convincing the skeptics (people who ask any questions).”
I love that they created a wiki page about a month ago for Vladimir Titar (their Chief Science Officer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vladimir_Titar&action=history
The page is flagged for deletion by Wikipedia already.
I can certainly see why. The page is one of the first deliberately badly written ones I have ever seen.
Photon looks intersting. Avoided the core because it uses that stupid CC3000 which only does 802.11g. Have preordered 2 of them and some other stuff.
heres information for targeting their “chief technology officer” Max Pavlov.the moron never heard of whois… anyways have fun!
Admin Name: Max Pavlov
Admin Organization: Kikvidze 18b
Admin Street: kv. 15
Admin City: Kiev
Admin State/Province:
Admin Postal Code: 01103
Admin Country: Ukraine
Admin Phone: +38-0-95-2206992
That whois entry and the fact that all of them seem to be from Ukraine perfectly fits the project description: “San Francisco, California, United States” ;)
You must feel like a big man now that you have shown us all how smart you are. And posted someone elses info in the comments. (in a place where people do know about WHOIS)
Unfortunately there is no way to mark this message as inappropriate :-(
Doxxing is sad. And you are even asking people to “target” him.
Doing a ‘whois’ lookup is not doxxing.
Bleen is a Russian curse word.
Does anyone have any good info on the Photon? The spark core stuff worried me back when they originally were funding it because of all the cloud stuff. They are not clear on their site at all, but are their ongoing fees associated with using their cloud infrastructure? Can you setup your own private “server” for your sparks/photons to talk to and skip the whole cloud thing?
If you can just use them as arduino compatibles with built in wifi for 19$ that’s a still a good deal, but being able to use some of their cloud bits without getting on another monthly fee train would be great!
“Delivery of perks listed on this page is subject to the best efforts of the team and similar to other crowdfunding campaigns not guaranteed. This disclaimer has been added to set reasonable expectations for our funders. Please note that any crowdfunding contributions are considered final, we do not offer refunds or product returns.”
So, they’re pretty much flat out saying they’re just going to rip everyone off and have nothing to deliver?