Ryan Block from GDGT has some major news from the iPhone 3.0 press conference, pretty soon you’ll be able to make/hack/add any accessories to the iPhone – wow! We’ll see some Arduino projects shortly via Gui.
10:20AM – Apps talk to accessories via the dock connector and via Bluetooth. Supports standard protocols (playing music, album artwork, etc.) and you can build custom protocols.
“With iPhone 3.0 we’re going to take this to the next level: we’re going to enable devs to build custom accessories that talk right to the iPhone.” This is exactly what people have been wanting. “You can give the iPhone an equalizer to a speaker system. Here’s another example: FM transmitter, which would find the optimal broadcast channel and play your music. Here’s another class we think will be interesting: medical devices.”
The Persistence of Vision (POV) Watch takes advantage of the theory of persistence of vision to create a unique wristwatch that displays the current or elapsed time while the arm is swinging (such as during a run or brisk walk). A sequence of LED patterns from the watch are displayed in quick succession and interpreted by the wearer as a single, static image appearing in “thin air.”
A Microchip PIC16LF628A handles the image display functions and interfaces with a mercury switch to detect the current direction of motion, which allows the image to be displayed twice per cycle (arm moving out and arm moving back).
Bre Pettis & Zach Hoeken have started an open source hardware company (MakerBot Industries) devoted to making robots, their flagship kit is the $750 “CupCake CNC Kit“…
This is the whole kit of everything you need to build yourself an awesome CupCake CNC machine. Imagine: a leisurely day of fun with a couple friends, and you’ll have your very own 3D printer. The future is within your grasp.
This particular kit comes with:
The lasercut parts to assemble a CupCake CNC machine.
3 x NEMA 17 motors to drive your machine
The nuts, bolts, and various hardware to assemble it.
The belts and pulleys for it to move things around.
All the bearings to make your machine nice and smooth.
3rd Generation Electronics to drive it better, faster, and stronger.
A magnetized, detachable build platform, as well as 10 foam build beds to print on.
A pinch-wheel Plastruder to make things in plastic with.
5 lbs of ABS plastic. Its hard, its strong, its awesome. Same material that LEGOs are made out of.
The Electronics Flea Market “swap meet” is held on the second Saturday (pre dawn) of each month, March through October (schedule). The flea market is organized by ASVARO for the benefit of non-profit amateur radio organizations in the Silicon Valley. The flea market was held in Sunnyvale in 2004-2005 and in previous years at Foothill College in Los Altos. The organizations that participate in the flea markets are active in amateur radio education, emergency communications, and civic support activities.
Someone needs to do one of those “Google map mash ups” to show where all the electronics flea markets are at in the world (and when!)…
Not too long ago there was an xkcd comic featuring the Kindle, we knew someone would eventually laser etch a new Kindle 2 but we didn’t expect it to be us! Here’s the first ever laser etched Kindle 2! Sean brought his over to the shop today and we “experimented”. We used 80% power and 100% speed on our Epliog 35W laser, the laser burned off a thin layer of metal and the results look great.
when i started building arduino brain machines i had a bunch of minipov boards left lying around, so i built one with uv leds. works pretty well. has it’s own font built in and room for about 950 characters of message. as presented here, there is an output bug at the end of the second line, but i reckon i’ll work on that in the morning. meanwhile, i can wave it around and wipe poetry onto a piece of butcher paper painted with fluorescent paint. here’s some not very good video of the chemical pov running the above code. the light does persist a little longer than it appears to in the video, but i think it will work better when i replace the current limiting resistors.
The creator of the TV-B-Gone, Mitch Altman, has turned his love of open-source electronic mayhem into a one-man business…
Many of his hacks, including the first versions of the TV-B-Gone, were built using the MiniPOV3 kit by hardware hacker Ladyada. That kit lets you create ghostly messages with a bank of 8 blinking LEDs, by waving the LEDs back and forth in the air.
By making changes to the kit’s circuitry, replacing the red LEDs with different colors and reprogramming the included microcontroller, Altman has made not only the TV-B-Gone, but also glowing lights that respond to hand gestures, an electronic “dog” that spins its tail in reaction to sunlight, a 3x3x3 cube of LEDs that displays abstract 3-dimensional patterns, and even a pair of glasses with embedded, flashing LEDs and a pair of headphones for getting your brain waves into a meditative state.
Altman is a fan of open-source hardware. The MiniPOV3 kit he uses is open source, and he recently released the schematics and code for his own projects as open source. Altman describes the decision to go open-source as a way of giving back to the hardware hacking community, which was already modifying and improving the TV-B-Gone.
“There are thousands of people who are incredibly intelligent and creative helping me, for free, and they love it,” he says, describing the benefits of open source hardware.
He’s also helped found a hacker space in San Francisco, Noisebridge, where hardware hackers (or those who would like to learn more about hardware and software) can gather to work on their projects.
“I make enough money to live the life I want to live,” Altman says. “And I love this life.”
“Learning electronics” skill badges from Adafruit Industries – In a week or so we will be including “learning electronics” skill badges in some of our kits & tool packs at Adafruit Industries. The first one is “learning to solder” – if you’re new to electronics, we’ll have a special bundle of tools, a kit and limited edition “badge” to show the world you’re proficient in soldering, once you complete the tutorials and kit that is!
We will have a variety of badges, the first is soldering – others include:
Arduino
LEDs (with conductive thread & real LED!)
Open source hardware
TV-B-Gone’ing
Reverse engineering
Dumpster diving
Laser cutting
WaveBubble
Our badges are made in the USA!
“Merit (or skill) badges” have a rich history as well as some modern adaptations. Let’s take a look!
Over the last few years there have been some amazing “badges” – the first ones that caught our eyes were the Science scout badges “ORDER OF THE SCIENCE SCOUTS OF EXEMPLARY REPUTE AND ABOVE AVERAGE PHYSIQUE” from The Science Creative Quarterly.
Excited? Stop back here next week for more details on the Adafruit badges! As we complete each badge we are releasing the artwork with Creative Common licensing so others can create badges too – this project is by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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