Tindie Gets Fundraisers For Kickstarting And Group Buys

December 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

tindie

The etsy of electronics project, Tindie, has a brand new feature: It’s a Kickstarter-esque endeavor called a Fundraiser that allows you to sell your projects to other electron enthusiasts.

Of course the new Tindie Fundraisers may soon be just another Kickstarter clone for “exciting,” “new,” and “innovative” Arduino dev boards, something we’ve lamented before. We’re really interested in seeing Tindie used as a platform for group buys; a solution to a maker’s special hell where buying one component costs $100, but ten cost $200.

Already there are a few really cool projects up on the Tindie Fundraisers including a breadboardable Parallax Propeller dev board. Yes, someone finally made one that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

In addition to the new Fundraisers, [emile] also closed on $500k of seed funding for Tindie. It’s wonderful news for something that is sorely needed by the maker community. Tindie is also hiring, so if you’re a Django/Python wizard go drop everyone’s second favorite robotic dog a line.

Open Compute Project Hosts Hackathon

December 11, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 6 Comments

The folks at Open Compute Project are running their annual summit in January, but this year they’ll be adding a hardware hackathon to the program. The hackathon’s goal is to build open source hardware that can be applied to data centers to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a foundation that develops open hardware for data centers. This includes power supplies, motherboards, and storage disk arrays. The project started up at Facebook, but it’s now an independent foundation.

The hackathon will take place over the two day summit on January 16th and 17th, 2013 in Santa Clara. The registration is now open, and it’s free but limited to the first 100 people.

The hackathon is being put on with collaboration from Upverter, Github, and GrabCAD, who will be providing tools for the event. If you’re in the Santa Clara area and looking to do some hacking early in the new year, you might want to check this out.

Making 3D Printing Easy At The Staples Copy Center

December 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

Mcor Technologies and Staples are teaming up to provide 3D printing services via the online Staples Office Center service.

This announcement comes from Mcor, the company behind the Iris 3D printer. Unlike just about every other 3D printer, the Iris doesn’t squirt plastic onto a bed or glue powder together – it makes its models out of sheets of paper. You probably won’t be ordering working steam engines or other heavy-duty engineering models from the Staples copy center, but this system does allow for high-quality full-color models to be created very, very easily. You can see a few examples of what the Mcor Iris can print after the break.

Unfortunately, unless you live in Belgium or The Netherlands, your local Staples won’t be installing a 3D printer in their copy center anytime soon. For those of us outside these countries, we’ll have to wait until services like Shapeways and Ponoko figure out how to make their business model include a brick and mortar presence.

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Adding Node.js Based Sensors To The Parrot AR Drone

November 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Max Ogden] wanted the option to add sensors to his Parrot AR Drone. This a commercially available quadcopter which runs Linux. This makes it rather easy for him to use Node.js to read the sensors from an Arduino board. The use of the Arduino is merely for easy prototyping. It is only needed to bridge the drone’s serial port with a sensor’s delivery method, so just about any microcontroller could be substituted for it.

There are some hardware considerations to take into account. The manufacturer was nice enough to populate a 0.1″ pitch pin socket on the serial port (if only this kind of invitation to mess with hardware was an industry standard). But the device expects 3.3V levels so pick your hardware accordingly. There is one commenter who tried the project for themselves and found that the drone wouldn’t boot up with the Arduino already connect — he had to boot and then complete connections. Troubles aside this makes adding your own sensor payload very simple and you don’t have to wait until landing to get at the data.

Maybe we’ll have to add some shock voltage data reporting to our shockerDrone.

LEGO LP Player

November 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

This LP player is made entirely out of LEGO parts. It plays the songs encoded on each record, but not by using a stylus in a groove. Instead, each LP has a color code on the bottom of it which is interpreted by the optical sensors underneath.

In addition to its functionality [Anika Vuurzoon] made sure that the build looked the part. The horn is a nice touch, but you’ll also appreciate the rotating mini-figures on the front side of the base. To the right there is a hidden door that provides access to the NXT brick which drives the system. New records are produced using a couple of different tools. First off, the song is written using Finale, a mature musical notation program. That is exported and run through a second program which produces the colored disc design which is applied to the records. You can hear the songs for yourself in the clip after the break.

If LP playing toys are right up your alley you’ll want to check out this 3D printed record hack for a Fisher Price toy.

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Wii U To Be Released This Weekend, Wii U GamePad To Be Torn Apart On Workbenches Across The Land

November 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, Nintendo will be releasing their next-gen console this weekend. It’s called the Wii U, and one of the most interesting features is the Wii U GamePad – the first controller to feature a full-color video screen right between the analog sticks.

Needless to say, we’re not terribly interested in the Wii U. The GamePad, though, looks perfect for robot controllers, FPV aerial vehicles, and a whole slew of projects that require some remote control.

The hardware for the GamePad is fairly impressive; apart from D pads and analog sticks, the new Wii Controller features a front-facing camera, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, 6.2 inch 854×480 touchscreen display, and an extension port housing an I2C bus for all your old Wii peripherals.

Other than a stock feature list, we have no idea how the Wii U will be able to transmit video to the GamePad. It might be WiFi, allowing you to connect all your projects to a wireless network and control them without a whole lot of hardware.

We’ll keep you posted on the developments of hacking the Wii U GamePad. Hopefully we’ll all have an awesome remote control by next year.

The New Template Has Arrived!

November 16, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 277 Comments

When we decided that our template needed a remake several years ago, we knew it was going to be a long and difficult process. We offered you a chance to give us some input in a recent post and now we are releasing the first iteration of the new template.

For those that saw the mockups and gave us your opinion, you will be happy to see we actually listened to many thoughts and incorporated them in our final design. We worked with some people at Google to determine what features should be tossed and what to keep, and what we have ended up with, is what you see. We also acknowledge that not everyone will love the change, but we feel it is a move in the right direction. We’re really happy how it has ended up.

I want to offer a special thanks to [Stephanie Froehner] who put tons of time into making this template pretty, even if it has been hacked and slashed a bit since then.

Join me after the break for an explanation of some of the new features and upcoming features.

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