"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better"
We will be broadcasting live from Microsoft NERD, Cambridge, MA during O’Reilly’s “Foo Camp East”. We’re not sure exactly how it will go since it’s a mobile broadcast, but we’re going to give it a go. We’ll have a special guest(s) – they “may” include… Amanda “w0z” Wozniack, Becky Stern, Leah Buechley and others.
Chat details!
Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
The New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 promised visitors they would be looking at the “World of Tomorrow.” Not everything they saw there came true, but plenty was close. One reason for that was the fair’s own lasting influence on American architecture and industrial design.
Looking forward to Maker Faire NY, and taking back our collective birthright of a “World’s Fair” celebrating science and technology.
This is a somewhat confusing response to our email asking about the availability of some Altoids (photo bbum).
Dear Limor Fried,
Thank you for taking the time to let us know about your difficulty in finding Altoids® Gum. We appreciate hearing from you. As you might imagine, we take feedback like this very seriously.
We’re sorry to say that Altoids has been discontinued. We thought it was a great product – and, clearly, so did you. But, sadly, we’re occasionally forced to discontinue a product when there is low consumer demand for it over time, which is what happened with Altoids.
We all have our favorite products and can appreciate your frustration at no longer being able to enjoy Altoids. Thank you again for reaching out to us about this. We hope that you’ll find other Wrigley brands that you enjoy, both now and in the future.
Sincerely,
Janell ******
Consumer Care Representative
We’re not sure if this is correct and likely a scripted response for weird flavors of BIG RED that are no longer made, but wow – what a response if true!
Introduced in 1780, Altoids were originally marketed to relieve stomach discomfort. By the 1920s, the original cardboard box had been replaced by the more durable distinctive metal tins of today. The irreverent, quirky personality of Altoids has led Altoids Peppermint tins to be a top-selling mint in the U.S. Over the years the Altoids brand has expanded to include not only mints but sours, gum and sugar-free mints in miniature portable tins. For fun facts, ad viewing, games and ordering we invite you to visit Altoids.com.
We have plenty of mint tins for all our products and we also have many options and enclosures going forward (don’t worry about that) – we’re hoping someone from Altoids will see this and clear things up. However, if it’s true we just got a scoop! Adafruit electronics *and* candy gossip site!
There’s an Easter Egg inside the chumby One (which is now on sale at Costco online for $99, cheaper than chumby.com’s $119 price!) that enables it to work with certain 3G USB modems and function as a 3G router (similar to a MiFi).
Use of the Easter Egg is documented on the chumby wiki, but it can be quite simple:
Plug in your 3G card.
Go to the Network Config screen by pressing the top button, going to Settings, then tapping on Network.
Select “create a new connection”, press OK, and wait for the scan to time out.
Select “Other”
Enter 3G as the name of the access point. It must have a capital G for it to work.
Wait for the subsequent scan to time out.
Select “Manual”.
Tap “OK” to select None as the encryption type.
Tap “OK” to select Automatic IP allocation.
Tap “OK” to confirm settings and connect to the network
To activate local wifi sharing, ssh into the device (or plug in a USB keyboard to activate the drop-down console) and use the command “touch /psp/start_ap” to flag the network setup scripts to configure your chumby One as an access point. Note that AP mode also works with other network sources, such as Ethernet-over-USB.
1842 – Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn’t have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.
Heard about Arduino but not sure how to start? Want to learn how to work with electronics and microcontrollers but need a little help? You’ve come to the right place! This bundle is designed to get you started quickly and easily on your path of learning electronics. Once you’ve received your starter pack you can follow the introductory tutorials here on my site, designed for everyone, even people with little or no electronics and programming experience. The starter pack
has everything you need (except tools) for all lessons.
It includes:
Arduino Duemilanove w/Atmega328 – The latest and greatest Arduino revision, assembled and ready to go, including 4 rubber feet
3′ USB cable – Perfect for connecting your Arduino to a computer
Protoshield Kit - One of my designs, its got everything you need to make prototype designs using an Arduino. Note that this comes unassembled
Tiny Breadboard – Fits on top of the protoshield, easy to use
9V DC regulated wall adapter – You can power your Arduino from any wall socket. This switching regulator is efficient and small and works with US (110V) and European (220V) power.
9V Battery case with switch and a 2.1mm plug- so you can power your arduino using a 9V battery. This case is much sturdier than just a battery clip and it has an on/off switch too! Note that this comes unassembled
Tutorial starter pack parts – Includes a 10K potentiometer, 1K potentiometer, 2 small pushbuttons, 5 red diffused bright LEDs, one each of red, green and blue ultra-bright LED, 5 100 ohm resistors, 5 1K resistors, 5 10K resistors, and a CdS photocell sensor.
OK…Take a deep breath, focus – be the change you want to see in the world – So far we’ve made a soldering badge and a few thousand are out there, Mitch gives these away during his soldering workshops and we include these with the Adafruit toolkits + kit. We’ve developed an Arduino badge that we give away at special events and we have a few more planned. There are not any electronics related achievements that can be earned in the Girl Scouts at this time, we’d like to help fix that.
Laptopograms are images made by pressing photosensitive paper onto a laptop screen and flashing an image in a manner not unlike contact printing or photograms.
The Adafruit team visited West Point, United States Military Academy today to speak about DIY trends, MAKE, hacker groups and open source hardware. Great group and we think you’ll see some interesting projects come out of West Point as they do more open hardware. Here are some photos to check out of the tour we received after our talk(s). Special thanks to Bob and the cadets!
We had a great chat this week! SOLAR POWER HOUR! We’re looking forward to seeing you all again this Saturday @ May 1, 10pm EST! We will be broadcasting remotely, we’ll see how it goes!
This one actually does have filaments. There are 12 light bulbs per digit; one for each numeral, and two for decimal points (left and right). These are neat little display modules that were made by a company called IEE (Industrial Electronic Engineers) way back before 7-segment LEDs were invented. Each light bulb sits behind a clear printed slide with the corresponding number printed on it in negative (the number is clear and the background is black), and in front of the slide is an array of tiny lenses. When a light bulb turns on, it projects an image of the number through the lens and onto the back of the lightly frosted plastic at the front of the display module. The Vintage Technology Association has a great exploded view so you can get a better idea of how this works.
The clock itself is fairly pedestrian although this design uses a quadrature encoder (the black knob on the upper right) to set the time. Instead of pushing on a button and waiting while the numbers slowly tick by, it’s much easier to just spin a knob.
Keeping time is the function of a DS3231 IC. The display is not multiplexed. A multiplexed display would involve a lot of diodes which would dissipate quite a bit of heat, and for this design, I use 6 ULN2003 driver ICs connected to 2 MAX7300 GPIO expanders. Technically I used devices that are pin compatible with the ULN2003 since nobody seemed to have any in stock. The microprocessor is a PIC18F2420 which communicates with the DS3231 and both MAX7300 devices using I2C.
This is interesting, if we’re ever a target of spammers, the spammers would just end up paying people in other countries to learn electronics with us since we rolled out Resisty last week! With the book-scan CAPTCHA they’re helping to translate books…
MUMBAI, India — Faced with stricter Internet security measures, some spammers have begun borrowing a page from corporate America’s playbook: they are outsourcing. Sophisticated spammers are paying people in India, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries to tackle the simple tests known as captchas, which ask Web users to type in a string of semiobscured characters to prove they are human beings and not spam-generating robots. The going rate for the work ranges from 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 deciphered boxes, according to online exchanges like Freelancer.com, where dozens of such projects are bid on every week.
On a related note, we haven’t a single spam since we rolled our new resistor solving CAPTCHA and colorblind readers / commenters report it all works fine for them
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