NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit Pi Box – Enclosure for Raspberry Pi. Keep your Raspberry Pi® computer safe and sound in this lovely clear acrylic enclosure. We designed this case to be beautiful, easy to assemble and perfect for any use (but especially for those who want to tinker!)
The case comes as 6 pieces that snap together, made of crystal-clear acrylic. This ingenious design has no screws or standoffs and there are cute little feet cut into the sides so that it stands up above your desk. There are engraved labels on all the connector slots. You can use all of the connectors on the edges of the Pi: HDMI, Audio, Video, SD slot, micro USB power, Ethernet and the two USB ports. We also added a slot so that you can connect a 26-pin IDC cable to the GPIO breakout pins on the Pi and pass it though the case. For more advanced hacking, the enclosure is designed so that you can remove the top piece and plug any sort of cables you wish into the breakouts in the middle. The case is airy enough that no additional vents or cooling is required – we tested the enclosed Pi over a 24 hour period at full load with no significant increase in temperature.
This product comes with the 6 acrylic pieces. Raspberry Pi computer is not included. No other cables or connectors or accessories are included.
What is the Raspberry Pi® ? A low-cost ARM GNU/Linux box.
The Raspberry Pi® is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The design is based on a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 256 megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. The Foundation plans to support Fedora Linux as the initial system software package/distribution, with support for Debian and Arch Linux as well – Wikipedia.
Join us for our weekly live video & chatroom– bookmark this page or visit our USTREAM page. You can ask anything about electronics, kits at Adafruit or just stop in to meet other makers who are building cool things! At the end of the chat we give away a kit from Adafruit to the winner of our trivia question! If you would like to connect to our chat via IRC (old schoolers), we are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv. 30 minutes before the show, check out Ladyada’s Google+ page for the weekly show and tell!
Last Christmas I built a Quiz Buzzer System for my mother. She is a big fan of television quizzes and love to organize some with her friends and family. The particularity of this project is that you can choose your team buzzer sound from a list of more than 30 digital sounds.
The system is composed of a main console, 8 buttons, a power supply and a set of telephone cables. The core of the console, built in a plastic project box, is made of an Arduino Duemilanueve micro-controller coupled with an Adafruit wave shield. The 8 buttons are made out of small project boxes and arcade buttons, again from Adafruit. The buttons are connected to the main console using telephone jack and cables.
Really well packaged and put together system. I really like how each team gets to choose their buzzer sound before the game. Uses our Arduino Wave Shield and Arcade buttons!
Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.
POSITION OVERVIEW: The Systems Administrator is responsible for overseeing the planning, coordinating, integrating, and monitoring all technical aspects for the graduate Products of Design department and contributing to the digital making aspects of the new Visible Futures Lab.
RESPONSIBILITIES: • Provide full technical support to the department and chair’s office. Daily activities include, but are not limited to: email, computer, printing, network, and server support for students, faculty, and staff; troubleshoot technical issues in the classrooms and studio; and assist in special events. • Support all A/V needs including videotaping, documentation, and publishing of lectures and special events. • Support department and course-specific website updates and troubleshooting • Support graduate students, faculty, and staff; serve as primary technical liaison for the department for all parties both internal and external. • Responsible for installing, setting up, maintaining, and servicing servers and client stations. • Responsible for installing and configuring software on client stations prior to each semester’s start and maintaining updates as needed. • Perform routine system backups; install and maintain Mac applications; diagnose and resolve hardware and software issues. • Provide support on annual projects including: orientation, public lectures, in-class guest lectures, year-end events, graduation, student conferences, and other departmental projects as required. • Participate with chair in determining department strategy for developing new digital communications and maintaining existing communications; work with chair and/or department interns, as appropriate, to execute those strategies. • Work closely with chair in estimating budget for new hardware/software purchases. • Review industry trends and faculty news to maintain foresight to keep staff and department as current, providing updates in weekly meetings.
Visible Futures Lab: • Monitor workflow and scheduling of digital making machines (laser cutters, rapid prototyping machines, etc.) as well as update related software packages. [Shared responsibility.] • Administer technical support for digital making aspects of Lab. [Shared responsibility.] • Support and answer questions from students and faculty when needed. Maintain inventory of specific Lab and department equipment, including ordering and updating of inventory lists. [Shared responsibility.] • Responsible for the maintenance, cleanliness, and safety of all digital making areas. [Shared responsibility.] • Maintain and open and ongoing dialog with Lab Director such that he or she is informed and up to date on progress, process, and status of all digital making machines. • Supervise, attend, assist, and guide graduate students and faculty in the Lab on safety procedures as needed.
QUALIFICATIONS: • Bachelor’s degree required. Minimum of five years technical administrative or technical project or product management experience. • Experience in higher education or experience with interaction design, industrial design, web design, or IT highly desirable. • Must have one to three years of administrator experience in an organization of similar size or environment. • Must be trained and/or have demonstrated analytical and technical skills and installing, configuring, and administering Mac file servers and/or Linux application and data servers and/or work stations, as well as performing back up and restore services. Ability to manage and communicate tasks, status, and deadlines, while being self-directed about own schedule. • Familiarity with desktop publishing, 3D rendering and 3D modeling software. • Strong ability with WordPress CMS, as well as moderate ability HTML/CSS. • Experience with physical computing. • Excellent written and oral communication skills required. Diplomacy and professionalism in working with individuals via email, over the phone, and in person. • Strong organizational skills, the ability to work independently, be detail oriented, and maintain focus while handling multiple tasks simultaneously. • Ability to interact with all levels of administrative staff, faculty, students, visitors, and prospective students.
The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City is an established leader and innovator in the education of artists. From its inception in 1947, the College has instituted numerous educational innovations, including the selection of professionals working in the arts and art-related fields as instructors. SVA provides an environment that nurtures creativity, inventiveness and experimentation, enabling students to develop a strong sense of identity and a clear direction of purpose.
Find out what it’s like to work at SVA. Visit http://www.sva.edu/workingatsva
To apply for this position, please send a cover letter and resume to working@sva.edu. No walk-ins please.
The School of Visual Arts is an equal opportunity employer.
There’s a night-mode, where all the LCD turns red, useful for astro-photography, when you need to be able to look at it without compromising your acquired night vision.
The interface is limited to a single rotary knob you can push to validate your choices. It remains easy and intuitive to use even when it’s minus 20°C and it’s pitch black.
The output is a standard 3.5mm stereo jack, you can use different cables to control different brand of DSLRs.
This lovely little display breakout is the best way to add a small, colorful and bright display to any project. Since the display uses 4-wire SPI to communicate and has its own pixel-addressable frame buffer, it can be used with every kind of microcontroller. Even a very small one with low memory and few pins available!
The 1.8″ display has 128×160 color pixels. Unlike the low cost “Nokia 6110″ and similar LCD displays, which are CSTN type and thus have poor color and slow refresh, this display is a true TFT! The TFT driver (ST7735R) can display full 18-bit color (262,144 shades!). And the LCD will always come with the same driver chip so there’s no worries that your code will not work from one to the other.
NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Leonardo ATmega32u4 with headers. The latest addition to the Arduino family is here! The Arduino Leonardo is a microcontroller board based on the exciting USB-enabled ATmega32u4 (datasheet). This chip has about the same amount of flash, RAM and capability as the ATmega328 found in the UNO. It has 20 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a micro USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.
The Leonardo differs from all preceding boards in that the ATmega32u4 has built-in USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary chip (such as an FTDI friend, FTDI cable or the USB/Serial converter on the UNO). On one hand this means that sketches on the Leo are a little bigger because it’s also handling USB interaction. On the other hand, it allows the Leonardo to appear to a connected computer as a mouse and/or keyboard, in addition to a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. It also has other implications for the behavior of the board; these are detailed on the getting started page.
We’re very excited to have a small shipment of Leo’s in stock. Please note that this board is very new and so is best used by people with existing Arduino experience as there may be a bug that trips up beginners. It is probably not going to work with nearly any shields other than the proto shield. We haven’t gone through and tested it with all the Adafruit shields and don’t guarantee it will work until we’ve sat down and done a lot of testing and coding, so keep that in mind!
This board is only supported in the latest Arduino IDE 1.0.1 so you will also need to update the IDE.
In stock and shipping (please not we only have a few of these, but sign up to be notified when the next batch is in if we’re out of stock!).
THE science-fiction author and technology prophet Arthur C. Clarke once said that a technology sufficiently advanced from our own would be indistinguishable from magic. So what will be onstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday night may look like magic in the boyish and capable hands of Brian Greene, the Columbia University physicist and author, who will perform the kind of tricks to make you think your eyes, or maybe your brain, have fallen out of your head.
Frustrated by the lack of co-operation from manufacturers, some academics now want to reinvent the medical-device industry from the ground up, using open-source techniques. In open-source systems, the source code is freely shared and can be viewed and modified by anyone who wants to see how it works or build an improved version of it. Exposing a design to many hands and eyes, the theory goes, results in safer products. This seems to be the case for desktop software, where bugs and security flaws in open-source applications are typically fixed much more quickly than those in commercial programs.
The Generic Infusion Pump project, a joint effort between the University of Pennsylvania and the FDA, is taking these troublesome devices back to basics. The researchers began not by building a device or writing code but by imagining everything that could possibly go wrong with a drug-infusion pump. Manufacturers were asked to help, and several did so, including vTitan, a start-up based in America and India. “For a new manufacturer, it’s a great head start,” says Peri Kasthuri, vTitan’s co-founder. By working together on an open-source platform, manufacturers can build safer products for everyone, while still retaining the ability to add extra features to differentiate themselves from their rivals.
So, apparently, humans found evidence of water on the Moon all the way back in 1976, but nobody was paying attention. Granted, it wasn’t a LOT of water (0.1% of sample), but still. From Technology Review:
One of the least known missions is the Soviet Luna-24 sample-return mission which landed on the lunar surface in August 1976. This drilled some 2 metres into the lunar surface, extracted 300 grammes of rock and then returned to Earth. An impressive feat by any standards but one that has been largely forgotten in the west.
A Soviet team analysed the sample and found unambiguous signs of water in the rock–they reported that water made up 0.1 per cent of the sample’s mass. In 1978, they published the result in the Russian journal Geokhimiia. This journal also has an in English language version but it was not widely read in the West.
Crott says that today the work has been almost entirely forgotten. “No other author has ever cited the Luna 24 work,” he says.
The Fulfillment Center Wireless Engineering team is looking for a Sr. Wireless Network Engineer with a passion for wireless technology and mobile solutions. We are looking for someone to join our growing team that is responsible for engineering one of the largest and most rapidly growing 802.11 networks in the world.
This position will define technology standards and policies for our global wireless infrastructure. You will work closely with client engineering to integrate embedded and standard operating systems such as Linux, Windows, etc. This position has a high level of interaction with our infrastructure vendors for customizing hardware and software to Amazon’s needs. This position works with our WLAN survey teams, FC infrastructure operations team, software teams and automation teams.
So cool to see Amazon posting positions on our jobs board. Looks like a fun job.
Just a friendly reminder that today is the last day to submit a talk, poster, or demo proposal for the 2012 Open Hardware Summit!The deadline is 11:59pm EDT. If you’re working on a proposal, you have until the end of today (New York time) to submit it — Good luck!
The Open Hardware Summit (OHS) invites submissions for the third annual summit, to be held on September 27, 2012 at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City. The Open Hardware Summit is a venue to present, discuss, and learn about open hardware of all kinds. The summit examines open hardware and its relation to other issues, such as software, design, business, law, and education. We are seeking submissions for talks, posters, and demos from individuals and groups working with open hardware and related areas. Submissions are due by May 31, 2012 BY 11:59pm (EST). Notification of accepted proposals will happen by July 8th, 2012.
Submission topics
Topics of interest for the summit include, but are not limited to:
Digital fabrication
DIY bio
Soft circuits
Wearables and fashion tech
Quantified-self hardware
Means of supporting collaboration and community interaction
On demand and low volume manufacturing
Distributed development and its relationship to physical goods
Software design tools (CAD / CAM)
DIY technology
Ways to share information about hardware that’s not captured in source files
Business models
Competition and collaboration
Sustainability of open hardware products (e.g. how to unmake things)
Industrial design
Open hardware in the enterprise
Specific product domains: e.g. science, agriculture, communications, medicine
Legal and intellectual property implications of open-source hardware
Open hardware in education
Addressing the gender imbalance in the open hardware community
And any other topic you think relates to openness and hardware. We want to hear all about it!
This year there are three types of proposals you can submit. You can propose a talk, a poster, or a project demo. The talk concept is self-explanatory. The demo sessions are just what they sound like: show off your open-hardware project! In case you need examples, here are two from last year by RobotGrrl and Chris Novello.
New for this year is the poster presentation concept — I think this has a lot of potential for sharing great ideas that might otherwise be missed. Posters fill the gap between project demos and talks. They’re less formal than plenary talks, but more conceptual (as opposed to hands-on) than demos. They give you a chance to exhibit a project or organization that you can’t physically present or which is beyond initial hardware design but not far enough along to be an auditorium presentation. If this sounds like you, consider submitting a poster presentation!
To use a Kinect with a computer instead of an Xbox, Watson needed a “driver” (basically a bit of software) that did not exist. He joined a small, far-flung, highly dedicated and technically sophisticated community effort dubbed OpenKinect, which sprang up immediately after the Kinect was introduced, to write the code that would make this possible. At the same time, Adafruit, a hobbyist-focused electronics company based in New York, offered $1,000 to the first person or group to write the necessary code in an open-source format.
At the time — this was shortly before the 2010 holiday season — Microsoft’s primary Kinect focus was the mainstream game-playing market. Its first response to OpenKinect seemed predictable: CNET reported an unnamed spokesperson declaring that the company “does not condone the modification of its products” and would “work closely with law enforcement . . . to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” Adafruit increased its prize, ultimately to $3,000. Within days a developer in Spain posted videos demonstrating that he made his Kinect work with a P.C. OpenKinect refined and spread the open-source driver code, and a variety of “Kinect hacks,” as they came to be called, proliferated in YouTube videos. (An early example involved a Kinect used to create a version of the hand-swipe control contraption Tom Cruise used in “Minority Report.”) Soon Watson and his wife, Emily Gobeille, posted their own video, in which her hand movements were captured by a Kinect and translated onto a screen displaying a computer-generated bird figure, which she controlled like a high-tech puppet.
Long story about the conflict and tension at Microsoft with the Kinect hacking… One note, we published the USB dump (and example) to get folks started on the open-source driver in addition to the bounty project with Johnny Lee.
Now that all eight chapters of Robotics with the Board of Education Shield for Arduino have been posted online, it’s time for me to prep the manuscript for a bound book. I’m hoping all the BOE Shield-Bots out there will join me in a hunt for typos and bugs, so I can fix them before they become paper-permanent and replicated. If (okay, when!) you find any errors, email me (editor@parallax.com) and I’ll be most grateful.
Okay, so the BOE Shield-Bot’s hermit-crab-like “eyes” can’t really operate as OCRs, even with this magnifying glass. But, these infrared emitter/receiver pairs can let it avoid objects or drop-offs, and gauge close-range distance well enough to follow another ‘bot. And, with a Sony-programmable remote, you can have an IR Remote Controlled Shield-Bot (a bonus mini-project with code and video posted).
Thanks in advance for your bug-hunting help!
-Steph Lindsay
Here’s a video of the Parallax BOEBot in action! We also took this one minute exposure of the bot zooming around the table. Video on YouTube and Vimeo.
Parallax BOEBot Robot for Arduino Kit (Board of Education). We are very excited about this one! This kit brings the excellent design and tutorials of Parallax to the Arduino world. Make your Arduino the onboard brain of a mobile robot and learn robotics, electronics, and programming with this versatile kit and its accompanying step-by-step lessons. The Board of Education Shield plugs into your own Arduino (not included) and mounts on the popular Boe-Bot robot chassis.
With this kit and your own Arduino module, you can follow the Robotics with the Board of Education Shield for Arduino lessons with over 40 hands-on activities.
Learning to program your robot’s Arduino Brain
Calibrating the robot’s continuous rotation servo motors
Using lights and speakers for status indicators
Assembling the robot
Preprogrammed navigation
Using touch-switches to navigate by contact with objects
Using phototransistors to navigate by light
Using non-contact infrared sensors to measure distance and avoid or follow objects
The original Robotics with the Boe-Bot text for the BASIC Stamp microcontroller has enjoyed worldwide popularity with teachers and hobbyists, and has been translated into seven languages. Author Andy Lindsay revised his work for the Arduino community, and Parallax Inc. is making it available as a free, online tutorial at http://learn.parallax.com/ShieldRobot.
Kit Contents:
Board of Education Shield PCB
High-quality aluminum robot chassis, continuous rotation servos, and wheels
Boe-Boost Module
All the electronic components and sensors needed for the Robotics activities
All the assembly hardware needed (nuts, screws standoffs)
Parallax Screwdriver
Please note: Arduino + USB cable not included! We suggest picking up an Uno + USB cable to complete the kit if you don’t have one at home already.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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