Maker Faire Kansas City: Entrepreneurial Spirit Taking Shape

June 30, 2015 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

One of the great things about an event like the Kansas City Maker Faire is that there are so many reasons that makers sign up to show their things. Some makers come to teach a skill, and others to sell their handmade creations. Those with an entrepreneurial streak looking to launch a product might rent a booth to get a lot of eyes on their idea. That’s just what [Ted Brull] of Creation Hardware was after this weekend–exposure for Kevo, his small-scale vacuum former.

Kevo is a simple and affordable solution for makers of all stripes. It can be used to make molds, blister packaging for items, or even electronics enclosures. [Ted]’s Kickstarter campaign for Kevo has already been successfully funded, but there’s still plenty of time to get a Kevo kit for yourself. The basic reward includes the vacuum-forming chamber and two sizes of adapters that cover most vacuums. It also ships with an aluminium frame to hold polystyrene sheets during the heating and molding processes, and starter pack of pre-cut pieces in black, white, and clear plastic.

Creation Hardware had many vacuum-formed molds on display and were constantly making more from 3D-printed objects, toys, and other things. Our favorite mold was a 20oz bottle of Mountain Dew, which shows how far the small sheets of plastic can stretch.

Olimex Claims The World’s First $9 Computer Costs $39

June 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 110 Comments

The C.H.I.P. from Next Thing Co. bills itself as the world’s first nine dollar computer. That’s not a lie; their Kickstarter took in over two million dollars for a tiny single board computer with composite Video, WiFi, Bluetooth 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a 1GHz CPU. That’s a complete computer, sans keyboard, mouse, and monitor. You won’t get that with the $35 Raspberry Pi – you’ll need to add a WiFi adapter and an SD card for the same functionality – and you won’t get that with any other single board computer.

Understandably, the C.H.I.P. is already extremely successful. The company behind it has about 50,000 pre-orders, and people lined up to wait until well into next year for this computer. Exactly how Next Thing Co. managed to build a single board computer and send it out the door for nine dollars is a question that has yet to be answered, and is leaving more than a few people puzzled.

The Olimex blog has given their opinion of the C.H.I.P, and if that’s to be believed, the news isn’t good. The guys at Olimex know their stuff when it comes to making cheap single board computers; they have more than a few for sale, and they know what the Flash and DRAM market is like. To them, it’s impossible to sell a computer like the C.H.I.P. at $9. A quote from Allwinner for a similar module is $16 at the quantity Next Thing Co. would be looking at. That’s just the module with RAM and Flash – no Wifi, no board, no connectors. How could it be possible to sell this computer for only $9?

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Programmable Pump Keeps Its Stick On The Ice

May 30, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Need to water your plants? Pump some coolant on a mill? Fill a watermelon with booze? Never fear, because the third greatest Canadian behind [Alan Thicke] and [Bryan Adams] is here with the solution to all your problems! It’s a cordless pump for desktop CNC, repair, and horticulture that automates daily chores and pumps out exact amounts of liquid.

[Chris], [AvE], Bright Idea Workshop, or, ‘that guy that records videos in his shop’ is rather well-known around these parts; we’ve seen him make an $80,000 gold-plated cutting fluid pot, a copper laminate desk, and recharge his cell phone with a car and a pencil. He’s very, very good at futzing around in his shop and the dialog is the closest YouTube will ever get to Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers, albeit without wheezing laughter.

The Kickstarter is for a rechargeable cordless pump, controlled by a microcontroller, that dispenses liquids of varying viscosity onto the item of your choice. It’s perfect for adding cooling to a drill press, watering plants, or something or everything involving beer.

Details on the pump are a little sparse, but given the liquid never touches the pump we’re putting money on some type of peristaltic pump. Add volume measurement, programmable flow rate adjustment, a timer, and dispensing programmable volumes of liquid, and you’ve got something useful.

Thanks [Scott] for the tip.

Finally, VR For Four Eyes

May 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the next few years, VR headsets will be everywhere, and everyone will slowly recede into their own little reality that is presented on high-resolution displays right in front of their eyes. One specific group will be left out: eyeglass wearers. VR just doesn’t work with eyeglasses, and a few people in Germany are fixing this problem. They’re creating custom prescription lenses for Google Cardboard, giving anyone with glasses the opportunity to look just a little more hipster.

The folks behind this Indiegogo already run a specialty optics shop in Germany. They have the tools to make custom lenses for spectacles, and they’re the first company so far that has identified a problem with the current crop of VR headsets and has created a solution. The campaign is for a set of lenses that can be attached to Google Cardboard with double stick tape. There are limitations on how strong of a prescription they can make, but it should work for most four eyes.

It should be noted this Indiegogo isn’t the only way to get custom lenses for a VR headset. If you have your prescription, there are a few places to buy glasses online for $30 or so. Do that, remove the lenses from the frame, and affix them to Cardboard.

A Very, Very Small IMU

May 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

The reason we’re playing with quadcopters, flight controllers, motion controlled toys, and hundreds of other doodads is the MEMS revolution. A lot is possible with tiny accelerometers and gyroscopes, and this is looking like the smallest IMU yet. It’s an 18mm diameter IMU, with RF networking, C/C++ libraries, and a 48MHz ARM microcontroller – perfect for the smallest, most capable quadcopter we’ve ever seen.

The build started off as an extension of the IMUduino, an extremely small rectangular board that’s based on the ATMega32u4. While the IMUduino would be great for tracking position and orientation over Bluetooth, it’s still 4cm small. The Femtoduino cuts this down to an 18mm circle, just about the right size to stuff in a model rocket or plane.

Right now, femtoIO is running a very reasonable Kickstarter for the beta editions of these boards with a $500 goal. The boards themselves are a little pricey, but that’s what you get with 9-DOF IMUs and altimeter/temperature sensors.

FUBAR Labs Gets A New Space

May 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

FUBAR Labs in New Jersey is one of the finest and most productive hackerspaces in the US. They have homebrew rocket engines, the eternal gratitude of semiconductor companies, and a broken Makerbot nailed to the wall: everything a hackerspace should have. Now they’re moving to a new space, and they’re looking for a little funding to turn their lab into what it should be.

There have been a lot of cool builds that have come out of FUBAR Labs including a Power Wheels racer, [Rick]’s Minecraft Circuits In Real Life, the now-obviously named Fubarino, a 3D printed balance bot. a gaseous oxygen and ethanol rocket engine.

Their 890 square foot space was already fantastic, but with a new space that’s 2300 square feet, they’ll be able to expand New Jersey’s finest hackerspace into what it should already be.

The guys at FUBAR put up a gallery of pics of the new space. You can check those out here. Next time Hackaday is in Jersey – or when we forget how to pump our own gas, whatever comes first – we’ll do a hackerspace tour of the new space.

Makey Makey Made Smaller

May 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

When it launched in 2012, the Makey Makey was the golden child of the maker movement. It was a simple, easy to use board with holes for alligator clips and a USB socket that would present capacitive touch pads as a USB HID device. Thus, the banana piano was born.

The Makey Makey is a device specifically designed to introduce kids to electronics in a way the Arduino can’t match; even with an Arduino, most of the work is with code. If you’re introducing electronics to a class of 10-year-olds, that might be a bit too much.

Now there’s a new Makey Makey on the block. It’s the Makey Makey Go, and it’s the same user experience as the Makey Makey classic made cheaper and much more rugged.

The Makey Makey Go features a single touch pad to clamp an alligator clip to. That’s enough to send any keypress or a mouse click over USB, where a wide variety of apps and games can make this tiny thumb drive-sized board useful. Banana pianos are out, and plant harps and Jello Flappy Bird are in.

There aren’t many details about the internals of the Makey Makey Go, but [Jay] from Makey Makey says the prototypes are based on the ATMega32u4, while the production units will use cheaper chips. Video below.

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