We’re getting ready to do some awesome stuff in 2013!
We can’t tell you about it yet, but we wanted to give you a bit of a teaser, so here’s a photo of an upcoming product that’s straight out of the future.
View it full-size on Flickr (warning: 4800×3840 — it’s huge) to get the full effect.
Happy New Year everybody — see you on the other side!
Today at the Adafruit Facebook page, I shared a couple of questions for our community based on conversations we were having back at Adafruit:
What music do you listen to when working on projects? And do you listen to different tunes for coding/modeling/computer work vs soldering/hardware hacking/building?
The responses there as well as at the Adafruit Google+ Community has been a lot of fun (and a great place to grab leads for my Spotify queue). I particularly liked this link shared by Adam Mayer — WorkMusicWork:
Music found on bandcamp suitable for listening to while coding. Submissions welcome!
Here’s a great project from “Paulc1″ in the Adafruit Forums — instead of a TV-B-Gone, it is something of a “TV-B-Tamed.” I really need one of these for my Raspbmc with its streams of web audio with highly compressed commercials as well as TV streams.
Read more over at the forums to see the problem solving steps the maker went through to tune for specific televisions that weren’t responding.
Out of frustration over TV stations and advertisers’s intrusive actions raising volume during commercials, and inspired by Adafruit’s tutorial on IR Detectors, I built a mouse trap with a Mic and an IR sending LED that could be set to a HI/LO level beyond which the gadget would send an IR code to either lower or higher volume if those limits were exceeded.
It consists of a mic feeding an amplifier with adjustable gain and sensitivity ,with the output to an analog input of an Atmega328 programmed to send a pre-set HI/LO IR codes if exceeded.to an IR LED.
A 4Quad comparator compares the signal level with a voltage divider of 4 resistors adjusted to a logarithmic Db levels,and the output to 4 led’s as volume bar.
The Two pots are for gain control and LCD backlight. A regulated 7805 power supply and indicator light are shown at the bottom right and a 6pin ISP was wired at top right to be able to reprogram the chip. A pin 13 red led by the IR LED shows IR activity.
For 2012 the Adafruit site clocked in over 55 million page views and over 16 million visitors. An interesting note, 2 million of the page views already came from our new learning system http://learn.adafruit.com !
Fascinating paper on thin film solar cells available at Nature.com:
Fabrication of thin-film solar cells (TFSCs) on substrates other than Si and glass has been challenging because these nonconventional substrates are not suitable for the current TFSC fabrication processes due to poor surface flatness and low tolerance to high temperature and chemical processing. Here, we report a new peel-and-stick process that circumvents these fabrication challenges by peeling off the fully fabricated TFSCs from the original Si wafer and attaching TFSCs to virtually any substrates regardless of materials, flatness and rigidness. With the peel-and-stick process, we integrated hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) TFSCs on paper, plastics, cell phone and building windows while maintaining the original 7.5% efficiency. The new peel-and-stick process enables further reduction of the cost and weight for TFSCs and endows TFSCs with flexibility and attachability for broader application areas. We believe that the peel-and-stick process can be applied to thin film electronics as well.
Last weekend, I went to the Guangzhou markets with my buddy Matt. There was lots of good stuff there, but one of the things that caught my eye were these PID temperature controller modules. Its the sort of industrial process control gear that is normally inaccessible to mortals. Fortunately for me, this was China, so I plunked down 80yuan and took one home with me.
Here’s a great round-up of interesting Edu-Tech Startups from this year — including … Joylabz / MaKey-MaKey! I wasn’t familiar with several of these, so I really appreciated her list.
It probably goes without saying, but I’ll type it out anyway: 2012 was an incredible year for education technology startups. Launches. Updates. Funding. Acquisitions. Adoption. Headlines. Disruptions. Drama. Politics. Buzz. Hype. Revolutions. And stuff.
…It’s my blog. My rules. My rubric — as much as there’s a rubric here. This isn’t some scientifically constructed list of the startups with the most registered users or most revenue or biggest Series A round or most popular iPad app or most Techcrunch headlines. I chose each of these for lots of different reasons (reasons I explain as I highlight them in turn): great technology, great product, great vision, great founders…
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
Pinokio comes in the form of a humble desk lamp, yet it redefines our experience of a lamp, a robot, or a computer algorithm. Pinokio the lamp is imbued with the ability to be aware of its environment, especially people, and to express a dynamic range of behaviors. As it negotiates its world, through the synthesis of the algorithm, electronic circuit and structural modifications; we the human audience can see that Pinokio shares many traits possessed by animals, generating a range of emotional sympathies.
We are here to raise the questions: “What if an industrial object is created not as an obedient tool, but to live? What if an algorithm utilises user input to gain awareness of a situation, rather than being controlled?” We therefore created this robotic computing project to explore the potential of a “living algorithm”.
Pinokio is by no means the most intelligent and self-sustaining entity. Nevertheless, we believe it is the expressive and behavioral qualities that makes Pinokio come alive. Just like Pinocchio the puppet who comes to life and confidently proclaims “I’m a real boy” – it is the irrepressible and seemingly instinctive impulse of living for its own sake in Pinokio that shines forth in poetry and magic.
Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!
And the past year provided no shortage of futureshock. We watched a cyborg compete at the Olympic Games, and marveled at the news that NASA was actually working on a faster-than-light warp drive. It was also a year that featured the planet’s first superstorm, the development of an artificial retina — and primates who had their intelligence enhanced with a chip. Here are 16 predictions that came true in 2012.
Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.
“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?
As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly. Even on a less lofty plane, companies like GitHub and Asana will ultimately test themselves against complex corporate processes lasting years, and involving skills in both science and the humanities. Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.
Fascinating talk about hardware hacking Tamagotchis. Thanks for the tip from Malcolm Tredinnick, who noted: “A nice combination of low-and high-level hardware and software reverse-engineering. Many techniques and tools that will be familiar to regular Adafruit readers in isolation and here they’re all pulled together into a fun story.” I totally agree.
Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation
You might remember Tamagotchi virtual pets from the 1990′s. These toys are still around and just as demanding as ever! This talk covers my attempts to hack the latest Tamagotchis. Starting with the IR interface, and moving down into the hardware, this presentation will discuss techniques for reverse engineering a device with limited inputs, computing power and debugging capabilities.
Recent Tamagotchis are more than just pets. They can talk to their friends over IR, support games on external ROMs and store generations worth of information about their ancestors. This talk goes through the different ways Tamagotchis can be tampered with through these channels, including making Tamagotchis rich and happy over IR, altering their states in persistent memory and writing custom games. It also goes through attempts to dump the Tamagotchi’s code from ROM.
Speaker: Natalie Silvanovich
Event: 29th Chaos Communication Congress [29c3] by the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]
Location: Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH); Am Dammtor; Marseiller Straße; 20355 Hamburg; Germany
xmas music in spain played on fish, champagne, crab, shrimp, grapes, gifts, etc. with #MaKeyMaKey
And from the YouTube video description:
Cada año vuelven los tópicos navideños: los típicos adornos, el gordo de la lotería, el de Navidad… La típica familia feliz, los petardos, los langostinos, el turrón, las uvas, el cava… Y el concierto de año nuevo, tan típico. ¿Y si a todo esto le metiéramos un poco de tecnología y creatividad digital? ¿Y si lo típico fuera reinventar los tópicos cada año? Suena bien, ¿verdad?
[ED NOTE: And here's quick Google Translate version, obviously very rough...rather than revise the resulting prose it I'll leave it that way: better than my nearly nonexistent Spanish.]
Every year Christmas become topics: the typical ornaments, the lottery jackpot, the Christmas … The typical happy family, firecrackers, shrimp, nougat, grapes, champagne … And New Year’s concert, so typical. What if all this we Shove a bit of creativity and digital technology? What if he was reinventing typical topics each year? Sounds good, right?
Every Monday is Makey Makey™ Monday here at Adafruit! The MaKey MaKey – by Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, made by JoyLabz! Ever played Mario on Play-Doh or Piano on Bananas? Alligator clip the Internet to Your World. MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Find out more details at makeymakey.com or watch the video at makeymakey.com. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything in between! If you have a cool project you’ve made with your Makey Makey be sure to send it in to be featured here!
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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