REMINDER: Adafruit is OPEN – taking orders & shipping during the winter break 12/24 to 1/3

Adafruit is OPEN and taking orders & shipping during the winter break 12/24 to 1/3 – support emails and forum responses will be answered as usual, but may take a little extra time as we recover from working around the clock & making sure everyone got their open source electronics this holiday season.

For any assistance, please visit our support section and forums for any customer questions – email inquires will be answered within 1 to 2 business days. Any phone calls will receive this same message, please use email or support forums only. The next “Ask an Engineer” show will be Saturday January 8th, 2011 – Thank you for a wonderful 2010 everyone! Enjoy the holidays and winter break folks!

Filed under: announce — by adafruit, posted December 23, 2010 at 9:25 am

Building an engineer


Building an engineer via Dangerous Prototypes.

Filed under: EE — by adafruit, posted December 22, 2010 at 11:32 am

LAST MINUTE GIFTS – Techy, hacker, maker gift certificates – AN ADAFRUIT ELECTRONICS GIFT GUIDE!

Pt 10686

Adafruit Industries Gift Certificate
A cyber-present for the electronics geek in you life! Make sure to note the recipient’s name, email address and any message in the “comments” box at checkout. Give the gift of Adafruit electronics, open source hardware and more!

20101216-T3Tqhuu5S7Uts7Pyqr8Yb16Wj2

Give the Gift of GitHub
Our favorite way to share code can also be gifted! You can sponsor paid GitHub accounts for all the hard workers contributing to open source projects. What a great idea!

Pt 10688

Instructables pro account
Give the gift of an Instructables pro account – the biggest and best show-and-tell site on the planet! We use a pro account here at Adafruit and love it.

Pt 10689

Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Can’t decide what to get your favorite Maker, Crafter or Hacker? Give them a gift certificate good for anything from the Maker Shed with the amount you choose. And best yet, you can choose to email it to them and avoid those long postal deliveries (Recommended). A great last minute present that could spark a lifetime of making!

Pt 10697

Ponoko gift vouchers
Give the gift of making! All you need to do is decide how much you’d like to give, we can put together a combination of vouchers below to that amount. Simply send an email to service-at-ponoko-dot-com with the details, including the email address you use for PayPal. We’ll then put through a PayPal Payment Request, and once that’s paid, we’ll send the vouchers to you as PDFs.

Pt 10690

Seeed Studios gift certificate
X’ mas and new year is coming, Seeed Studio Gift Certificates is on special! Purchase Gift Certificates now for 20% off, you can purchase as many as you want, send them to someone as a GIFT, or use with your own order.  Each unit can be redeemed for 1 USD. For example, you pay 80 USD (100 Units)  but 100 USD will be added to your account balance. The special will be expired on 26th, Dec.

Pt 10692

SparkFun Gift Certificate
SparkFun Gift Certificates are entirely virtual. Enter the amount you wish to purchase on this page and add it to your cart. Once you’ve placed your order and your payment has been confirmed, the Gift Certificate money is yours to distribute as you see fit.

Pt 10693

TechShop Gift Certificate (membership)
Not exactly a gift certificate, but you can buy a membership for a friend, family member or yourself! Get access to nearly $500,000 worth of tools, machines, 2d and 3D design software, and professional equipment for around $125 per month.

Pt 10694

ThinkGeek Gift Certificate
Available in 8 different amounts, (ranging from $10 to $150) Gift Certificates are e-mailed to the recipient as a code that is entered when that person comes to the ThinkGeek site and places his/her order. If you already have a ThinkGeek account, you can go directly to this page to order a gift certificate.

Pt 10695

Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate
Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate, if you’re in to robotics, Trossen is one of the top distributor of hobby and educational robotics in the United States.

Pt 10696

United Nuclear gift certificate
Looking for some Uranium? These folks have it. From radioactive samples to chemistry sets, this is one of the most unique, amazing online stores.

Others you *can* give which are not exactly gift certificates but can be sent “in the name of” are donations to the EFF, Tor Project and Engineers without Borders.

Missing from our list, but what what we would like to see:

  • Digi-Key Gift Certificate
  • Jameco Gift Certificate
  • McMaster-Carr Gift Certificate
  • Mouser Gift Certificate
  • MakerBot Gift Certificate
  • Parallax Gift Certificate (!)
  • Pololu Gift Certificate

It’s your turn, which gift certificates are you giving this year, which ones did we miss? *And* which gift certificates do not exist that you’d like to give?

Filed under: announce,gift guides — by adafruit, posted at 12:01 am

Adafruit is OPEN – taking orders & shipping during the winter break 12/24 to 1/3

Pt 10685

Adafruit is OPEN and taking orders & shipping during the winter break 12/24 to 1/3 – support emails and forum responses will be answered as usual, but may take a little extra time as we recover from working around the clock & making sure everyone got their open source electronics this holiday season.

For any assistance, please visit our support section and forums for any customer questions – email inquires will be answered within 1 to 2 business days. Any phone calls will receive this same message, please use email or support forums only. The next “Ask an Engineer” show will be Saturday January 8th, 2011 – Thank you for a wonderful 2010 everyone! Enjoy the holidays and winter break folks!

Filed under: announce — by adafruit, posted at 12:00 am

VR & Kinect


VR & Kinect

Filed under: kinect hacking,random — by adafruit, posted December 21, 2010 at 5:59 pm

Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free

Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free, fun quote from the letter…

When young, I remember clearly how my father told me why our country was so great, mainly based on the constitution and Bill of Rights. Over my lifetime, I’ve seen those rights disregarded at every step. Loopholes abound. It’s sad. For example, my (Eisenhower Republican) father explained the sanctity of your home and how it could not easily be entered. It was your own private abode. And you had a right to listen to any radio signals that came because the air was free and if it came into your home you had a right to listen to it. That principle went away with a ban on radios that could tune in cell phone frequencies in the days of analog cell phones. Nobody but myself seemed to treat this as a core principle that was too much to give up.

Read the entire thing here…

Filed under: random — by adafruit, posted at 5:07 pm

The Viability of Open Source Hardware: Lessons Learned From RepRap

For his graduate thesis, Erik de Bruijn chose as his topic the viability of the Open-Source Hardware model, citing and discussing examples from the RepRap community. From the abstract:

While open source software development has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about the viability of the same development model for a physical object’s design. This thesis addresses this deficit by exploring the extent to which this model is viable for the development of physical objects. It starts with a review of the relevant literature on open source and user innovation communities followed by a case study and survey of the RepRap community.

This community develops a digital fabrication system that can 3D print a large share of its own parts. This allows for a decentralized community to independently produce physical parts based on digital designs that are shared via the internet. Apart from improving the device, dedicated infrastructure was developed by user innovators.

The survey reveals substantial adoption and development of 3D printer technology, comparable to the larger vendors in the industry. RepRap community members arespending between 145 and 182 full-time equivalents and have spent between 382,000and 478,000 dollars on innovation alone. At the RepRap project’s 6 month doubling interval, it is entirely feasible that its adoption and disruptive levels of innovation will exceed that of the incumbent industry. Within the community there is a higher incidence in modifications of hardware than in software, and, surprisingly, hardware modifications are expected to be relatively easier for others to replicate. The level of collaboration is also higher for hardware than for software.

…

Many RepRap community members possess a fabrication capability that the aver-age person does not have access to. While this does limit the present day generality of the case study findings, there are many reasons to expect a high likelihood of personal access to digital fabrication in the near future. The rapid development and adoption of increasingly affordable, yet more powerful and valuable fabrication technologies and the anti-rival logic of open design allow user-dominant collaborative development to have significant implications for the provisioning of goods in society.

I really like this. It provides a good understanding of what OSHW is about from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Further, the insights into RepRap, its history, and the community around it are very interesting. From a writing standpoint, it’s (naturally) academic, but not difficult to follow or overly dense. If you’re looking for some deep reading over the holidays, you should check it out.

The author has published the article on scribd, as well as a PDF, both of which are linked to from his blog.

Well done!

Filed under: open source hardware — by johngineer, posted at 12:45 pm

IF YOU WANT YOUR ORDER TO ARRIVE BY XMAS – CHOOSE OVERNIGHT

Ups-Truck-Hybrid

Ok gang, final stretch – IF YOU WANT YOUR ORDER TO ARRIVE BY XMAS – CHOOSE OVERNIGHT.

Filed under: announce — by adafruit, posted at 10:00 am

And The Moon Be Still As Red

Tonight’s lunar eclipse will be a rich shade of red, due to refraction. From Discovery.com:

Weather permitting, skygazers in northern America and Europe are in for a treat in the early morning hours of Tuesday, when the first total lunar eclipse in almost three years is poised to turn the moon pink, coppery or even a blood red.

Coinciding eerily with the northern hemisphere’s mid-winter solstice, the eclipse will happen because the sun, the Earth and its satellite are directly aligned, and the moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by its mother planet.

The moon does not become invisible, though, as there is still residual light that is deflected towards it by our atmosphere.

Most of this refracted light is in the red part of the spectrum and as a result the moon, seen from Earth, turns a reddish, coppery or orange hue, sometimes even brownish.

…

The eclipse runs for three and a half hours, from 6:33 GMT to 10:01 GMT (1:33 a.m. EST to 5:01 a.m. EST), although the stage of total eclipse — when the moon heads into the “umbra” cast by the Earth — lasts from 7:41 to 8:53 GMT (2:41 a.m. EST to 3:53 a.m. EST).

Ah, Nature. Always with the drama.

Filed under: random — by johngineer, posted December 20, 2010 at 12:59 pm

Virtopsy – hacked Kinect makes the medical rounds

This Video demonstrates, how the Microsoft Kinect can be used to control a PACS system, in this case OsiriX. The software is based on ofxKinect, libfreenect and open frameworks.

Filed under: kinect hacking,random — by adafruit, posted at 12:25 pm

Sign language using Kinect

This a video presentation of the ongoing effort in American Sign Language recognition using the Kinect by researchers at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Filed under: kinect hacking,random — by adafruit, posted at 11:07 am

MikuMikuDance with OpenNI(Kinect)

MikuMikuDance with OpenNI(Kinect)…

Filed under: art,kinect hacking — by adafruit, posted at 9:43 am

Start making mistakes if you want to learn electronics


Start making mistakes if you want to learn electronics…

Filed under: EE — by adafruit, posted December 19, 2010 at 10:03 pm

CAN I GET AN ARDUINO BY XMAS FROM ADAFRUIT? YES YES YES!

Arduinouno Lrg-1

Arduinounobottom Lrg

CAN I GET AN ARDUINO BY XMAS FROM ADAFRUIT? YES YES YES! A lot of customers have asked if it’s still possible to get an Arduino by Christmas, YES! But you will need to order 2nd DAY or OVERNIGHT – make sure to do this immediately. We have plenty in stock!

Filed under: announce,arduino — by adafruit, posted at 2:48 pm

“Ask an Engineer” – 12/18/10 (video) – last one of the year! Thank you everyone for a great 2010!


“Ask an Engineer” – 12/18/10 (video) – last one of the year! Thank you everyone for a great 2010!

Filed under: ask-an-engineer — by adafruit, posted at 12:10 pm

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