AdaFruit – Purveyors of fine geek supplies, AdaFruit are offering 10% off any kit on Ada Lovelace Day, if you use the code LADYADA. Our hope is that customers will use the 10% off as an incentive to pick up a kit for their daughter, wife, girlfriend, partner, friend, sister, aunt, mom, cousin (you get the point) or just someone out there who might be inspired to consider electronics, engineers, science and technology as possible careers or hobbies.
Tonight, by popular demand – “Ask an engineer” 10pm ET with special guest Amanda“w0z” Wozniak. w0z was on a previous show (our most info-packed one so far) – and she designed the MONOCHRON clock enclosure. W0z is a staff Electrical Engineer at Wyss Institute and formerly an applications Engineer at Analog Devices. This will be a great show. Previous video here (thanks George).
Pictured above, W0z’s suitcase – when she visits us she brings a toothbrush and a suitcase full of electronics! Pictured below, one of W0z’s drawings for the MONOCHRON.
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming and complicated process.
Making video easily accessible is something we’re working hard to address at YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages — all in just a couple of clicks.
Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a “request processing” button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video
We will still have captions made for our Citizen Engineer videos, it didn’t cost us much and it was very accurate. Eventually all video services will do this automatically like YouTube is now…
I’ve been a forum member for a little over a year now and I’m constantly amazed at the amount of talented people on this forum who go out of their way to help new people getting into electronics find their way around. I know i’ve been one to ask a lot of boneheaded questions, but despite that I’ve still received a lot of help and learned a lot from the advice i’ve received.. I wanted to personally thank Westfw, Entropy, Zener, adafruit (and a couple others who’s name escapes me at the moment) for taking their time to help me and all the other new guys to the club. I love this place.
rizla420 thanks for the kind words and support! The Adafruit forums are a place we work very hard for everyone to get help and enjoy, thank you and special thanks to all the contributors! We will be adding more features and more cool stuff to the forums soon!
To help out with Finding Ada – Wednesday 24th March 2010 “Ada Lovelace day” – we are going to have a 10% off sale. On Wednesday 24th March 2010 we will post a 10% off code (it will be LADYADA) and you’ll be able to get 10% off all of the Adafruit kits we make…
Here’s a bit about the event…
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge (click ‘pledge’ after you have completed the reCaptcha) and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010.
…and some background.
Who was Ada? Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software. Read more on our About page, or Wikipedia.
Out hope is that customers will use the 10% off as an incentive to pick up a kit for their daughter, wife, girlfriend, partner, friend, sister, aunt, mom, cousin (you get the point) or just someone out there who might be inspired to consider electronics, engineers, science and technology as possible careers or hobbies.
Adafruit.com had 249,582 visits and and 1,020,019 pageviews for February 2010 – thanks everyone, great month – the interest in electronics grows each month! Your projects fuel our blog, keep them coming! In the past we hit 1m page views in 30 days across our 3 sites, but this is for February in a calendar month on just 1 site, Adafruit.com – we do not take advertising, but we still have goals
And now the big news! Adafruit Industries hits its 50,000th order! We’d like to thank Philadelphia University’s Industrial/Digital collaborative design studio and their students for placing the 50,000th order on Adafruit.com! Thank you and thanks to every customer who got us here, we promise that we will work even harder for the next 50,000 orders.
Here’s a quick video of our new kit, the MONOCHRON – we’ll be posting more videos soon – here’s a taste! (HD version on Vimeo, m4v here!)…
This easy kit has an default animated display, but is easily hackable to do whatever you wish – pictured above, retro arcade style table tennis for two.
128×64 LCD (KS0108) – we special-ordered the black and white display
ATmega328 processor (we even stuck an ‘arduino’ stk500 bootloader on there too)
Plenty of space for mods, a prototyping area for soldering stuff in
Soothing animation of retro arcade style table-tennis for two
Comes with: clock kit (includes all parts, programmed chips and LCD), coin battery, enclosure, 9VDC power supply for 220V or 110V. You’ll need some basic soldering & hand tools that are necessary to assemble it! The good news is that this is a pretty basic kit and even if its your first soldering project, it shouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 hours to put together For much more information including parts list, instructions, videos, etc. check out the MONOCHRON website and you can order one here!
We started shipping and we’ve already had customers making them, the first customer has said “Assembly was a snap and it works great.” – thanks SSquire!
After a request from a NYC public school we were set up to be a vendor! Adafruit is now vendor # ADA216659 in the NYC FAMIS system. This means any public school in NYC can now purchase electronics from Adafruit – so, if you’re a NYC public school and buy electronics, email us and we’ll hook you up with some sweet discounts!
Yesterday the Adafruit blog hit 1,000 posts – Thanks for all the engineering news, tips, emails, customer photos and support! The site is only possible because of you! Here’s to 1,000 more! Z00m!
In a world where robots and humans struggle together in the fight against boredom. . . Only one event ends up with the robots dancing “The Human” while the meat puppets (you) end up singing the praises of RoboBartenders. This February, come hang out with some alternate life-forms at BarBot 2010 – the third annual festival of Cocktail Robotics! BarBot is a celebration of cocktail culture and man-machine interface. Get a drink from an actual robot. Chat up a snarky electronic bartender. Listen to some graceful tunes being played by robotic music makers. And, after downing your sixth martini, you can finally admit that it’s the geeks who shall inherit the earth. These robots don’t clean the carpets. What they will do is much, much better. They make you a drink! Let your roommate do the vacuuming. These bots have got better programming on their mind.
Adafruit is open 24/7 – and we’ll be shipping / processing orders on Monday 2/15/2010. President’s day. Postal orders will be processed and shipped the following day since the USPS is off on Monday. For UPS, President’s Day – February 15, 2010 is recognized, but not observed. All pick up and deliveries will happen as scheduled, any expedited order placed over the weekend and/or Monday will ship if it’s in stock. And a special note, there are severe weather alerts all over the USA at the moment: winter storms on the East Coast of the United States, many packages will be delayed – just keep that in mind if you’re checking tracking #s.
Titled Washington’s Birthday, the federal holiday was originally implemented by the United States Congress in 1880 for government offices in the District of Columbia (20 Stat. 277) and expanded in 1885 to include all federal offices (23 Stat. 516). As the first federal holiday to honor an American citizen, the holiday was celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday, February 22. On January 1, 1971 the federal holiday was shifted to the third Monday in February by the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This date places it between February 15 and 21, which makes the name “Washington’s Birthday” a misnomer, since it never lands on Washington’s actual birthday, February 22. A draft of the Uniform Holidays Bill of 1968 would have renamed the holiday to Presidents’ Day to honor the birthdays of both Washington and Lincoln, but this proposal failed in committee and the bill as voted on and signed into law on June 28, 1968 kept the name Washington’s Birthday.
The first attempt to create a Presidents Day occurred in 1951 when then the “President’s Day National Committee” was formed by Harold Stonebridge Fischer of Compton, California, who became its National Executive Director for the next two decades. The purpose was not to honor any particular President, but to honor the office of the Presidency. It was first thought that March 4, the original inauguration day, should be deemed Presidents Day. However, the bill recognizing the March 4th date was stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee (who had authority over national holidays), who felt that, because of its proximity to Lincoln’s and Washington Birthdays, three holidays so close together would be unduly burdensome. During this time, however, the Governors of a majority of the individual states issued proclamations declaring March 4 to be Presidents Day in their respective jurisdictions. Later on, the Washington’s Birthday holiday would concurrently become known as Presidents Day.
By the mid-1980s, with a push from advertisers, the term “Presidents Day” began its public appearance. Although Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, was never a federal holiday, approximately a dozen state governments have officially renamed their Washington’s Birthday observances as “Presidents Day”, “Washington and Lincoln Day”, or other such designations. However, “Presidents Day” is not always an all-inclusive term.
Happy Chinese New Year! Stop by for “Ask an engineer” TONIGHT 10pm ET – 2/13/2010 tonight!
YEAR OF THE METAL TIGER
1914, 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010 – Tiger people are sensitive, given to deep thinking, capable of great sympathy. They can be extremely short-tempered, however. Other people have great respect for them, but sometimes tiger people come into conflict with older people or those in authority. sometimes Tiger people cannot make up their minds, which can result in a poor, hasty decision or a sound decision arrived at too late. They are suspicious of others, but they are courageous and powerful. Tigers are most compatible with Horses, Dragons, and Dogs.
Topics will include:
MONOCHRON clock kit is finished, parts are on the way – you can pre-order during the show. The demand was so high from folks who could not attend last week we’re going to do this again. We also did not have a lot of time to answer questions, so we’ll spend more time this week on engineering questions. Clock and engineering Q&A – *this* is what Saturday nights are made of!
We will have a 10% off code for ADAFRUIT KITS during the chat and 10% pre-orders for the MONOCHRON clock. We’ll also have a give away and MOSFET THE CAT. Happy Chinese New Year!
Chat details!
Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
Update this is going on now! Phillip will be doing a call/chat live from Adafruit Industries “FutureCast: open-source hardware and MAKE-ing the future” – join Jerry Mchalski and Phil in a one hour conversation as they discuss topics such as open-source hardware, new hacker-spaces opening up, and the Fabber and Maker movements as they continue to develop in the coming years. The conversation will take place Thursday, February 11th from 11:00am to 12:00pm PST. Toll Free number: 1-800-868-1837 – International number: 1-404-920-6440 – Participant code: 548723# . We will turn on the Livestream feed as well (located here) during the call, we may do a quick tour of the Adafruit factory, we’ll see if it works out
Many folks who frequent Adafruit and the Adafruit forums know our friend Caitsith2 – he posts in the forums dispensing useful and helpful advice, he has beta tested our latest clock kit and has contributed some cool TV-B-Gone mods. We are pleased, thrilled and ecstatic to announce he will be helping us out in the forums providing support for Adafruit customers! We spend hours each day answering questions in the forums, posting tips and helping out beginners to pros – and now we’re adding more staff to do more, faster and better. So give a warm welcome to Caitsith2 Adafruit_Support in the Adafruit customer forums!
Our goal at Adafruit is to have the best open source hardware kits at the best value with the best support. Having staff in the forums around clock in addition to the massive tutorials we try to publish all the time, videos, blog posts, Flickr photos,Twitter chatter – along with our weekly live video chat, and near-instant email response time for customer order inquires are all part of what you get when you choose Adafruit as your source for electronics
Thank you for the support! We will continue to do our best to support you!
