A lot of readers are likely familiar with Adafruit Industries, supplier and maker of many kits found in the Maker Shed. In addition to my role here at MAKE, as senior editor, I also work with Limor (Ladyada), helping her with the open source hardware kit business. I’ll have a few articles about general things we do around here to keep the ship afloat and charting new waters, but I thought I’d start this “Maker Business” article with an overview of how it all works and how we use many many web tools/services. One of the most asked questions I get from makers is “what shopping cart do you use?” The short answer is Zencart, and while I think it doesn’t actually matter what you use when you start out, this is what we’re using at Adafruit. A recent milestone, we just shipped our 50,000th order. We mostly create and sell open source hardware, most of the tools we use are open source — I’ve never seen an article detailing “everything” a business uses online, so here’s one. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let’s take a look…
One person who has likely fielded just about every curveball the kit business can throw is Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried. Thankfully, she’s taken the time to post a variety of helpful kit-biz resources, materials, and suppliers over at LadyAda.net – plus there’s a discussion forum dedicated to the topic on Adafruit’s site.
Adafruit is testing SQUARE payment system – WE HAVE BETA DONGLE. Here are some photos and video! It’s after midnight, this was a 30 sec vid, we’ll do another one later So far we’ve taken payment with the system, works great – SQUARE did a wonderful job, small biz owners and regular folks who want to take payments are going to have a lot of fun with this.
[edit: the dongle is milled & glued, not 3D-printed!]
Cool glowing blue tube with 8 digits and alarm on/off dot
Adjustable brightness
Alarm with volume adjust
Precision watch crystal keeps time with under 20ppm (0.0002%) error (< 2 seconds a day). Pretty much every time-keeping clock in your house runs on 20ppm (or so) crystals. if you look on your computer motherboard you'll see one there.
Clear acrylic enclosure protects clock from you and you from clock
Battery backup will let the clock keep the time for up to 2 weeks without power
Selectable 12h or 24h display
Displays day and date on button press
10 minute snooze
Integrated boost converter so it can run off of standard DC wall adapters, works in any country regardless of mains power
Great for desk or night table use, the clock measures 4.9″ x 2.9″ x 1.3″ (12.5cm x 7.4cm x 3.3cm)
Completely open source hardware and software, ready to be hacked and modded!
Complete kit comes with a 110/220V 9VDC power supply for use worldwide, all components including PCB, vacuum fluorescent tube, backup battery and a clear acrylic enclosure. Assembly is required! This kit is made of through-hole components but is best built by someone with previous soldering experience as there are many parts and steps.
For assembly instructions, user manual, code, schematics, and more, please visit the Ice Tube Clock webpage!There is also a design document describing the hardware, which is worth checking out as there are a few cool hacks involved in this design. One is an onboard open-loop boost converter that uses a microcontroller PWM pin to generate 60VDC to light the tube. Another is code for a microcontroller-only low-power RTC that runs at only 50uA without the need of an external RTC chip.
Hooray, the breadboard power supply from Adafruit is put together and working. I look forward to not clawing my face off in frustration every time I have to ******* breadboard anything requiring power.
DIY shield for Arduino! Think you can do better? Design your own shield on the cheap with this DIY parts kit. You get a 3.2″ x 2.5″ (~ 8.1cm x 6.3cm) single-sided phenolic board with copper solder pads and mounting holes and a extra-special stacky header set. This one has one magical 8-pin header that has been bent so that you can plug it into the ‘not-quite-0.1″-spacing” arduino headers. Solder it any which way you want, lots of room for hacking! Get one in the Adafruit store, only $6.00 !
Bre Pettis & Zach Hoeken have started an open source hardware company (MakerBot Industries) devoted to making robots, their flagship kit is the $750 “CupCake CNC Kit“…
This is the whole kit of everything you need to build yourself an awesome CupCake CNC machine. Imagine: a leisurely day of fun with a couple friends, and you’ll have your very own 3D printer. The future is within your grasp.
This particular kit comes with:
The lasercut parts to assemble a CupCake CNC machine.
3 x NEMA 17 motors to drive your machine
The nuts, bolts, and various hardware to assemble it.
The belts and pulleys for it to move things around.
All the bearings to make your machine nice and smooth.
3rd Generation Electronics to drive it better, faster, and stronger.
A magnetized, detachable build platform, as well as 10 foam build beds to print on.
A pinch-wheel Plastruder to make things in plastic with.
5 lbs of ABS plastic. Its hard, its strong, its awesome. Same material that LEGOs are made out of.
Play the short video above to see what it looks like with 4 modules
In 1970, John Conway came up with a 1-player game called Game of Life. The Game of Life is a mathematical game that simulates ‘colonies’ that grow or die based on how crowded or lonely they are and is known for the way it creates a beautiful organic display out of randomness.
Here is a design for a simple electronic project that plays Conway’s Game of Life. Make one kit and keep it on your desk, or attach multiple kit modules together to create a large display.
Originally created by Dropout Design, this revision adds a few extra features. You can build the boards from the schematic and open source firmware, or buy full kits from the Adafruit shop. The kit is very easy to make and an excellent first electronics project. It is perfect for workshops since at the end everyone can connect their completed module together.
Features:
Each kit displays a 4×4 grid (16 LEDs)
Connect as many kits as youd like, in any configuration, to create a larger game board
Runs off of 2 AA batteries, but can be easily modified to run off of USB or wall-wart power
On/Off button to save power, also for resetting the display
Automatically resets if the colony has died or stagnated (regeneration)
Here is an example of how to make a cool Internet application using the XPort shield I recently released. This is very simple, but its a good example of getting and outputting data. Basically the Arduino serves up a webpage with a bunch of nice javascript code that allows you to select a color. It also displays a “current color” (in this case a light green)
When you click "Submit" on the page, another request is made to the XPort/Arduino, this time with a GET command ?color=#xxxxxx with the color information. The Arduino looks for this command, parses the color requested and calls analogWrite() on the three LEDs to change them into that color.
Want to try it out? Go to -> http://ladyada.net/make/eshield/colorpickerfwd.html which will forward you to the correct IP address (since I dont have DNS for my home network). The XPort can only receive one connection at a time so if you cant get thru, please be patient!
Want your Arduino to check email? How about sending a twitter (which can then be easily forwarded to a phone via SMS)? Or grabbing data from a website? There are so many possibilites for projects that connect to the Internet to get data, now there’s an easy way to do it with an Arduino.
This shield allows you to add and use an XPort or XPort direct(+) Ethernet module (they cost only US$30-$50) using any 4 pins. All of the TCP/IP stack awfulness is done for you in the module so its super easy to just connect to any server.
Arduino is a great starting point for electronics, and with a motor shield it can also be a nice tidy platform for robotics and mechatronics. Here is a design for a full-featured motor shield that will be able to power many simple to medium-complexity projects.
2 connections for 5V ‘hobby’ servos with high-resolution dedicated timer – no jitter!
Up to 4 bi-directional DC motors with individual 8-bit speed selection (so, about 0.5% resolution)
Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil or interleaved stepping.
4 H-Bridges: L293D chipset provides 0.6A per bridge (1.2A peak) with thermal shutdown protection, 4.5V to 36V
Pull down resistors keep motors disabled during power-up
Big terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (10-22AWG) and power
Arduino reset button brought up top (Diecimila only)
2-pin terminal block to connect external power, for seperate logic/motor supplies
oPossom totally rocked my socks with a simple hack to turn a Minipov3 kit into an IR code receiver. The kit is modified to store incoming IR signal into the EEPROM which is then spit out via the serial port to a custom program that then translates it directly into a code for TV-B-Gone kits.
So far we’ve taken payment with the system, works great – SQUARE did a wonderful job, small biz owners and regular folks who want to take payments are going to have a lot of fun with this.
