2012

Beagle Bone Tutorials by Ladyada @adafruit – Tutorials for the TI embedded Linux board, ASK AN EDUCATOR and more. Fun Skill Patches Offered by Adafruit, NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – The End of Cash @ MAKE. Program your Arduino via IR using the Arduino IDE, Fancy telemetry control display for a quadcopter
@ Hack-a-day.

2011

“Ladyada’s bedazzler on BBC, Open Hardware and Micro-Manufacturing Made Easy(er). Watch Laughing Baby Videos Under the Stars in this YouTube Theater @ MAKE. Photon Banner @ Hack-a-day.

2010

Radio Shack answering machine messages, Arduino 1.0 notes, Our promise – no social network malware on Adafruit (Facebook, etc). RoboGames 2010 “Greatest Hits” high-speed music video, Meet the integrated circuit @ MAKE. Toner transfer explained step-by-step @ Hack-a-day.

2009

Reverse-Engineering DOS 1.0, Robot bartender @ MAKE. Make your own LEDs @ Hack-a-day.

2008

Walk – Don’t Walk chair @ MAKE. Hack your prius with prius batteries @ Hack-a-day.

2007

Gmaps pedometer – keep track where you run @ MAKE. Electric (motor)cycle extra @ Hack-a-day.

2006

Power tool drag races – LIVE coverage (photos and video!) @ MAKE.

2005

How to Make a Suit Case PC @ MAKE. Proximity Card Spoofer @ Hack-a-day.

Way Back In Time…

1951

The chemical giant Dupont jumped into the apparel game when it launched Dacron, the first ever commercially available polyester fabric, known as Dacron in New York City on May 8, 1951. The first offering was men’s blended suits, made with 55% dacron and 45% worsted wool. Polyester was later was blended with a number of other fabric types, including cotton. Advertised as modern and easy, Dupont targeted its fabrics across markets, from couture to factory workwear. Today, almost 50% of the consumer fabric market is still made up of polyester.

1937

On May 6th, 76 years ago, the Luftschiff Zeppelin #129, also known as the Hindenburg, crashed while landing in Manchester Township, New Jersey. It was the largest aircraft by volume in the world at the time. Of the 97 people on board, 36 died as a result of the crash. The highly publicized and photographed crash turned the public off of airships (also known as zeplins) forever, marking the end of a (very short-lived) era.

1790

In 1790, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand with the new French National Assembly decided to create a simple, new system of measurement units. The first unit chosen was based on a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The following year, after a proposal by the French Academy of Sciences, the definition of a meter was revised to 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator. It wasn’t until April 7, 1795, however, that this new decimal system, that was a precursor to the metric system were declared the legal and official means of measure within France.  Hence the annoying conversion chart above.  A less remembered fact is that there was a simultaneous proposal (later dropped) to change the week from seven to ten days, called “décades,” thus abolishing Sabbath and the Church’s stranglehold on people’s Sunday mornings.

1742

Jean Senebier, the botanist who first clearly demonstrated that plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of direct light, was born May 6th, 1742. His 1800 publication, “Physiologie végétale,” was fundamental to the development in understanding photosynthesis.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today @ PCWorld.

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler Filters’ IBM 402, with self-employed field engineer Duwayne Leafley in the foreground. (Photo Courtesy Ed Thelen / IBM 1401 Group)
Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.

Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.

Way Back In Time…

1964

The Bell Labs-produced picture phone made the world’s first transcontinental video call from Anaheim, CA to New York, NY 49 years ago this week.  Later that year, the phone was displayed the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, where visitors could pay $16 to $27 for 3-minute phone calls to Chicago or Washington.  Though AT&T tried to market them commercially, picture phones were only picked up for internal use by a few large companies, and ultimately AT&T discontinued the service by the 1970s.

1867

The patent for the zoetrope was granted to William F. Lincoln of Providence, RI on April 23, 1867. The zoetrope had been invented some 2,000 years earlier in China by Ting Huan, but was rediscovered in the western world, with patents filed first by William George Horner in England under the name Daedaleum in 1834, and over thirty years later in the United States, where the name zoetrope caught on for the pre-film device that mimics movement.

1813

The first contract for machine-manufactured interchangeable parts across different models was signed on April 16, 1813 with Berlin, CT gun manufacturer Simeon North. For the first time, the federal government stipulated that the 20,000 pistols be made with interchangeable parts, a tall orders in the age of hand-machining.  North invented a number of machine production techniques, including possibly the first milling machine that enabled more uniformity across parts than had previously been possible using hand-milling techniques. North maintained a fifty-three year long contract with U.S. Department of War to manufacture guns.

2012

Adafruit Academy updated with LEDs, Knitting machine hacks & more @ Adafruit.

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer, SushiBot! & MAKE.

Build your own USB to Serial dongle @ Hack-a-day.

2011

ASK AN ENGINEER 4/9/2011 @ Adafruit.

Turn Your iOS Device into an Oscilloscope @ MAKE.

Android skips uncanny valley – fills in at the office for you @ Hack-a-day.

2010

Laser etched iPad @ Adafruit.

Wicked robosculptures @ MAKE.

Will this mouse get me kicked out of the coffee shop? @ Hack-a-day.

2009

Modularity and community fuel open source hardware innovation @ Adafruit.

Jeri Ellsworth and Short Circuit #1 @ MAKE.

Motion detecting cat toy @ Hack-a-day.

2008

Send a message… @ Adafruit.

Pneumatic exoskeleton makes lifting a breeze @ MAKE.

iPod laser pointer @ Hack-a-day.

2007

AVR Dragon + STK500 for $49 @ Adafruit. Donkey Kong in post-its
@ MAKE. World Weather Umbrella @ Hack-a-day.

2006

Circuit board art @ MAKE. Irongeek’s Wall of Social Science Majors @ Hack-a-day.

2005

Build your own GameBoy @ MAKE. wooden laptop @ hack-a-day.

2004

Way Back In Time…

1994

The first commercial spam was sent out on April 12, 1994 by lawyer Laurence Canter, who was trying to drum up business for his Arizona law firm.

1919

J. Presper Eckert, inventor of the ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, otherwise known as the first all-purpose fully electronic computer, dubbed the “Giant Brain” by newspapers at the time of its unveiling. Several of its vacuum tubes failed every day, rendering it inoperable half of the time. Nonetheless, it was in use by the U.S. military for nearly a decade, until its retirement in 1955.

1633

On April 12, 1633, Galileo’s second trial for his heliocentric beliefs began. Galileo was found guilt of heresy and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. It was while under house arrest that he considered some of what is considered his best work, including Two New Sciences, which formed the groundwork for kinematics and strength of materials.

Way Back In Time…

1954

On March 25th, 1954 the first commercially available color television was sold by RCA. The TV was built using a 1947 patent by Alfred Schroeder for a shadow mask CRT and was available just weeks after the first national color broadcast on January 1st, 1954.  The combination of expensive equipment and lack of broadcast material made color slow to catch on, and it wasn’t for another decade that the average American home had a color television.

1885

The first commercially produced continuous-strip photographic film was manufactured on March 26, 1885 by the Eastman Dry-Plate and Film Company in Rochester, NY.  George Eastman had received his patent in 1884 intending roll-style film to replace bulky, inconvenient glass-plate photography that had preceded it.

1773

Nathaniel Bowditch, born in Salem Massachusetts, some 150 years after the witch trials spread fear and superstition across his otherwise reputable town, was known for early innovation in mapmaking in the colonial United States as well as the first insurance actuary as president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company in Salem.

1759

In a letter written to a friend dated March 30, 1759, Giovanni Arduino first proposed stratigraphic chronology via a geological classification system that divided formations into four categories:  the Primitive, Secondary, Tertiary and Volcanic or Quaternary.  Aspects of this classification system are still in use today. But clearly the important aspect of Giovanni Arduino is the fact that he shares his last name with a certain single-board microcontroller. Coincidence? Of course not!

Way Back In Time…

1937

© Matteo Bocci

H.P. Lovecraft, the beloved weirdo scifi writer who inspired countless horror flicks and metal bands died 75 years ago last Friday.  He was buried in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, RI, immediately adjacent to Butler Hospital, the insane asylum his father had perished in some forty years earlier.

1752

Mary Dixson Kies, the first woman to obtain a U.S. patent, was born on March 21st, 1752, in Killingly, Connecticut.  After patenting a new method for weaving in straw hats, she found it difficult to reap a profit from her invention and despite her work, died penniless in Brooklyn in 1837. A similar design had been developed earlier by a woman, Betsy Metcalf, who refused to file a patent for shame of having her name, as a woman, appear before Congress.

1474

On March 19th, 1474, Venetian Patent Law declared that “each person who will make in this city any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, as soon as it is reduced to perfection… It being forbidden to any other in any territory and place of ours to make any other contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and licence of the author up to ten years.” The first modern patent law of any kind, Venice was aiming to attract new business and invention to its city.  The law set a precedent that spread like wildfire:  England and France quickly followed suit and shortly afterwards nearly the whole of Europe had some sort of patent law enacted.

2012

We added UAVs, science and biohacking blog categories. MAKE “What’s So Awesome About Makerspaces?” and Hack-a-day “SpeechJammer puts an end to annoying speakers”.

2011

ASK AN ENGINEER (old RCA ad). “Make: Live Episode 04: DIY Musical Instruments” with Collin & Becky. Micro audio player can hide behind a postage stamp @ Hack-a-day.

2010

INTRUDERCHRON! Soaps that look like Petri dish cultures @ MAKE. Google your home with a roomba @ Hack-a-day.

2009

Our TV-B-Gone video. Checkin’ In: Eccentric Genius Kaden Harris @ MAKE. Automated DVD dispenser @ Hack-a-day.

2008

Open source hardware @ Etech (PDF) @ MAKE. Modular snake robot @ Hack-a-day.

2007

Octopart – search engine for electronic parts… (launch!) @ MAKE. XBox 360 homebrew a comin’ @ Hack-a-day. MAKE, pt and ladyada visit the Colbert report.

2006

MAKER FAIRE PREVIEW – Hardware hacking workshop @ MAKE. Xbox 360 hard drive adapter @ Hack-a-day.

2005

g5 alarm clock @ Hack-a-day.

Way Back In Time…

1937

Valentina Tereshkova, Soviet cosmonaut extraordinaire, was born on March 6, 1937. She was the first woman to fly in space. She was working in a textile factory when she was selected for her parachuting abilities and proletariat background.

1930

Logician, mathematician and psychologist Christine Ladd- Franklin died on this day in 1930. Her theories of gradual development of color perception were integral to explaining color blindness.  She was also the first American woman to complete all requirements necessary for a PhD, although her alma mater, Johns Hopkins, refused it to her at the time, waiting forty-four years to grant it to her in 1926.

1886

The first alternating current power plant opened on March 6, 1886 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It transmitted 500 volts with power driven by a water mill until a storm damaged the plant shortly afterwards and the project was abandoned.

1847

Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electric battery and namesake of the measure of electric potential, the volt, also died today 166 years ago. He invented the electric battery, and also studied the relationship between electrical potential (V ) and charge (Q ), discovering that for a fixed item, they’re proportional. Hence the volt.

2012

At this time last year the Raspberry Pi Foundation was announcing new partners for a new model of Rapberry Pi.

2010

In 2010 someone put Lincoln on a PCB…this was of course before they knew he would also win an Oscar. Maybe they should be mass-produced…

2008

In 2008 we were selling new Arduino shields!

Way Back In Time…

1879

Coal tar…ahem, saccharin was invented mistakenly in a lab at Johns Hopkins University on February 27, 1879 while a scientist named Constantin Fahlberg was developing coal tar compounds.  After returning home, his lips came into contact with his hands, and he realized that the compounds had an intensely sweet flavor.  He developed it into something marketable, which later became the first commercially available artificial sweetener, always in a pink packet, known as saccharin.

1864

On March 1, 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the African American female to become a doctor, after receiving her degree from the New England Female Medical College in Boston.

1852

John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kellogg’s, born February 26th, 1852, was an early proponent of low calorie, low fat diets, his at-the-time bizarre lifestyle now seems a portent for many of the medical and dietary beliefs that are now commonplace.  He publicly announced his conviction that cigarettes caused lung cancer long before any study had linked the two, and he advocated vegetarianism and regular exercise decades before it became regular for the medical establishment to do so.

Road?  Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!

1897

In 1897, Ferdinand Braun published a paper on a Braun Tube, the first known version of a cathode-ray tube. He first developed it as a means of understanding time-dependence of alternating currents.  The Braun Tube evolved into the handy-dandy oscilloscope, used by makers everywhere!

1809

2011

ASK-AN-ENGINEER, year of the rabbit! @ MAKE – Why Are Fewer Students in Science Fairs? & at Hack-a-day 8×8 LED infinity mirror!

2010

Sparkfun carries our MintyBoost! “Why I believe in maker culture” @ MAKE. Repurposing a click wheel at hack-a-day.

2009

@ MAKE – Modeling a character for 3D printing. At hack-a-day, TinkerKit, physical computing toolkit.

2008

@ MAKE – Electronic graffiti artists win laser cutter contest. At hack-a-day, DMX light control for home automation.

2007

@ MAKE, Egg Drop Strategies. Hack-a-day, Optical recognition LED control.

2006

@ MAKE, Golfing on the moon…on this day, 1971. hack-a-day, BackTrack Live CD.

2005

@ hack-a-day, underwater video camera.

Way Back In Time…

1915

Robert Hofstadter was born today ninety-eight years ago. He pioneered work in the structures of nucleons and his work helped create an understanding of the order of subatomic particles.

1897

3.141592653589793238462… = 3.2!?!?!?!
The Indiana Legislature passed a law mandating that the circumference of a circle equal 3.2 times its diameter. It argued that “the ratio of the diameter and circumference [pi] is as five-fourths to four.” It made it through the Indiana House but not through the Senate…

1821

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn an M.D. in the United States, was born on February 3rd, 1821. Incidentally, when she was accepted to medical school, reviewers at the Geneva Medical School (now Hobart and William Smith College) initially thought her application was a spoof. Nonetheless she graduated in 1849.

2011

On ASK AN ENGINEER we released our touchscreens. On MAKE Phil invited Marissa Mayer to Maker Faire. Hack-a-day had a Security Audit Kit in a Mouse.

2010

Alicia Gibb’s “New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool”… on MAKE “Maker Birthdays: Douglas Engelbart”, on Hack-a-day reviewed the iPad.

2009

On MAKE, Building papercrete domes. UHF power harvesting on Hack-a-day.

2008

On MAKE, DIY Applesauce – Grid enabled USB Microscope on Hack-a-day.

2007

On MAKE, Call for Makers: Maker Faire Bay Area 2007. Cakebot: mindstorm cake slicer on Hack-a-day.

2006

Burning visible images onto CD-Rs with data (beta) – MAKE. Hack-a-day, Robotic motion sensing using an optical mouse.

2005

pt’s podcasting @ MAKE set up.

cellphone ring notifier, hack-a-day.

Way Back In Time…

1950

Photo Credit: TRF_Mr_Hyde  cc
On January 30, 1950, the development of the hydrogen fusion bomb was ordered by President Harry Truman. This new type of thermonuclear device was far more powerful than the fission bombs used against Japan in WWII.

1911

On February 1st, 101 years ago, fingerprints were used for the first time in the US to convict a person in a court of law. Thomas Jennings was sentenced to death and hanged in Cook County, Illinois for the murder of Clarence Hiller.

1903

Photo credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library
Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale was born 110 years ago yesterday.  She developed new x-ray technology in order to study crystal structures. Her work, though seemingly esoteric, had an enormous impact on organic chemistry. She was the first woman to be elected (1945) to the Royal Society of London.  Born into an Irish middle class family of ten at a time when it was rare for women to even attend college, she went on to become a tenured professor at University College London and the first woman president of the Union of Crystallography.

1855

The first commercially viable “mechanical calculating machine” was patented to a William Seward Burroughs, born January 28, 1855. The patent was submitted in 1885 and he formed his company, the American Arithmometer Company, shortly after, in 1886 (we kind of wish there were still companies around with names like that…) The wealth built by his invention enabled his grandson, William S. Burroughs II, to become a member of the beat generation instead of a banker. You could say his poetry was built partly by a calculator…

1400

Photo Credit: Cecil Sanders via cc
(Not specific to January, but sort of feels that way after last week…)
In 1400, and a few centuries before and after, it was significantly colder across the globe than normally… the world was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. Average temperatures across the globe plunged and stunted human population growth and agricultural potential for much of the (normally) temperate world.  The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished and the population of Iceland was halved.  Certain agricultural products were abandoned because of changing rain patterns…orange crops in southern China failed and the Thames River in London froze.  The Little Ice Age only ended about one hundred years ago, at the end of the 19th century or the early 20th century, bringing about another re-adjustment in agriculture and population (ahem, Great Plains).

2011

Two years ago Becky was still broadcasting Make: Live from her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

2010

Three years ago we launched book-selling with our perennially popular Arduino and electronics guides.

2008

Five years ago Phil and Make sent TV-B-Gone Kit to CES, to widespread acclaim and  confusion when tvs at booths across CES were mysteriously silenced.

2006

On New Year’s Day seven years ago, LadyAda felt compelled to stay at home & organize all the x0xb0x stuff for the third run. The satisfying results pictured above.

Way Back In Time…

1948

On January 24, 1948, IBM dedicated an early prototype, called a Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, in New York City. The machine occupied a 30′x60′ room, with space for a punch card operator to work in the center.

1930

Today in 1930 Clyde Tombaugh photographed what was then labeled the last planet to be discovered in the solar system, Pluto. Pluto has subsequently been downgraded to a mere dwarf planet after it was discovered that it shared the Kuiper belt with several other bodies.

1911

On January 23rd, 102 years ago, after having already earned a Nobel Prize, Marie Curie was denied entrance into the French Academy of Sciences. She went on to win a second prize despite the Academy.

Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. - Dr. Emmett Brown. Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!

2011

Ask an engineer – vinyl cutter night!

@MAKE – Kindle Unswindle — how to remove the DRM from your purchased books.

2010

Adafruit has an offsite, Ladyada climbs

An overview back when Sparkfun had free days.

@ Hack-a-day – Animatronics reference.

2009

@ MAKE – Made in Japan.

@Hack-a-day – How-to: Prepare your Eagle designs for manufacture.

Adafruit starts to release the IceTube clock.

2008

Using terminal blocks w/Boarduino.

@MAKE – Bre Pettis leaves MAKE, goes to Etsy, then a TV pilot, then MakerBot.

@Hack-a-day – Bluetooth headset for PSP/PS2.

2007

New DigiKey site.

@MAKE – HOW TO – Use a driver’s license as an Ableton Live MIDI controller.

@ Hack-a-day – Lazy psp player (automatic woodchopper).

2006

@MAKE – HOW TO – Make lock picks (videos)…

@ Hack-a-day – DIY Fig rig.

Ladyada working on boarduino 2.

2005

@ Hack-a-day – overclock your calculator.

Segway technology on stage.

Ladyada’s pink bike.

Way Back In Time…

1915

1861

On January 14, 1861, the first patent for a safety elevator “called a ‘hoisting apparatus’ in the application) was granted to Elisha Otis from Yonkers.

1706

Oh, Benjamin Franklin, first great American paradigm-maker. He created the first insurance company.  And the first fire station.  And fiddled with keys in lightning storms (as our first grade teacher would have it).  Could he be called the first great American hacker?  He certainly did have a way of thinking differently.  Many of his inventions were ignored or discarded for decades before their use was realized.  He “discovered” the Gulf Stream, by researching maritime travel times, contributed to research of general effects of liquefaction on electrolytes.  If only we could send him an Arduino…

1501

An illustration from Fuch’s text: De historia stirpium commentarii insignes

Leonhart Fuchs, the father of botany and origin of the name for fuchsia, was born on January 17, 1501.  The world would be a little less purple-magenta without him…

Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. - Dr. Emmett Brown. Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!

2011

The Arduino Uno SMD was released and we talked about in ASK AN ENGINEER.

Mosfet starts demanding soup.

MAKE had “alt.CES” coverage.

ladyada and pt go to Jerusalem.

2010

Ladyada & w0z did a great show and talked about the MONOCHRON case w0z designed.

We went to the beach.

Over on hack-a-day they were at CES and met up with MakerBot.

At MAKE, Craft meets tech at MIT.

2009

Ladyada & pt entered their prototype networked power meter “Tweet-a-watt” into the Greener Gadget competition in New York.

MAKE has their series “How-to Tuesday: Maker’s Notebook” with Marc de Vinck.

MAKE television site goes live. www.makezine.tv

At Hack-a-day, Bug Labs introduces new BUGmodules.

2008

The newly released TV-B-Gone kit visited CES.

Intro to surface mount soldering @ Hack-a-day.

A working Stargate @ MAKE.

Laser etching Leathermans for CRAFT & MAKE.

2007

Updated SpokePov software released.

Ybox!

Optoisolated xmas light control @ Hack-a-day.

iRobot Create, projects and (more) photos… @ MAKE.

MAKE controller board.

2006

Ladyada was working on x0xb0x, 3rd run.

MAKE releases a Mac widget on Apple.com.

pt’s VR rig being built.

2005

Convert an old battery into a linux cpu monitor @ Hack-a-day.

pt makes iPod shuffle glasses.

pt’s linux iPod for interviews and recordings.

Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. - Dr. Emmett Brown. For the third edition of Time Travel Tuesday, we’ll be looking at Christmas day here at Adafruit, across the DIY, open source and science/tech world!

2011

What did you GIVE this year? & we publushed our Arduino R3 outline for Adafruit EAGLE library.

On Hack-a-day, a badge creator tool was posted.

On MAKE “Tinker, Tinker, Little Star”.

2009

Ladyada & pt did a 2 hour ASK AN ENGINEER and they made a “MakerBot watch”.

On MAKE, “Sweet vacuum tube clock build”.

2008

Ladyada & pt laser etch Joshua Topolsky’s (at the time editor in chief of Engadget, now The Verge) laptop.

On MAKE “Using Google App Engine as a personal CDN” by Jason (who now works at Google) and on Hack-a-day “Hackit: What did you get?”

2007

We tried to turn off a lot of TVs.

On MAKE “HOW TO – HDR photography in Gimp or Photoshop”.

2006

Ladyada publishes the wavebubble:

I jammed Santa’s GPS so he couldn’t find his way to your house – “In a high-population-density city, inhabitants must be prepared to defend their own personal space. Technologies that increase personal productivity are on the rise, even though they may intrude on others. The unavoidable reaction is to create technologies that counteract other people’s devices. Wave Bubble is a product that counters the all-too-familiar annoyance of loud ring tones and overt cell-phone conversations in public.“

Also covered on Hack-a-day & MAKE.

We also made a game of life kit(s) & open-source MP3 players.

2005

pt was working on a chat bot at MAKE magazine.

..and experimenting with a VR rig.

On MAKE “DVD to iPod – Convert, the easy way (Mac)”.

2004

pt publishes how-to articles on modding the iPod firmware.

There were some lasers too.

On Hack-a-day, free *your* music with jhymn

2003

pt was in Japan with SONY & QRIO.

1906

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska (Born 25 Dec 1906) was a German electrical engineer who invented the electron microscope (more @wikipedia).

1642

Sir Isaac Newton (Born 25 Dec 1642). English physicist and mathematician, who made seminal discoveries in several areas of science, and was the leading scientist of his era. His study of optics included using a prism to show white light could be split into a spectrum of colours.

This day in history from the History channel (video). Worth noting, Dec 28, 1895 First commercial movie screened.

Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. - Dr. Emmett Brown.

For the second edition of Time Travel Tuesday, we’ll be looking at the pre-Christmas period last year here at Adafruit and across the DIY open source world:

2011

At this time last year, we were just releasing new Adafruit skill badges, including Android, Instructables, Beagle Bone, Tesla Coil and the high altitude balloon.

2010

On Makezine, HP announced it was ditching its proprietary OS Touchpad and making its OS open source…we’re still waiting for the open source version to be released…HP says this will happen in 2013…

In celebration of the 2010 movie Tron, we create a do-it-yourself Tron bag tutorial, modeled by Limor here.

2009

The definitive guide to DIY projects three years ago included tons of arduino shields, blinky projects and the introduction of the Twitchie.  Just refer back to the last three years of blog posts to see how far we’ve come in three years using these still popular products.

Hackaday featured Eyewriter, an open source eye tracking technology collective to help paralyzed graffiti artist Tony Quan make use of his eyes for movement after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Students at MIT built their first fully vertical roller coaster.  Dubbed the cowgirl, this hair-raising ride hung you upside down and terminates vertically…all compliments of our favorite college undergraduates.

2008

Meggy Jr. landed.  We started stocking the arduino-core handheld gamer. Unfortunately, they didn’t sell well and we don’t carry them now.  Some experiments take off, some don’t, but we always learn.

DIY RFID tags and readers debut on Instructables.  Of course RFID hacking has been around for a while (Wired featured five hackers back in 2006), but this is the first time we saw a how-to guide for making both the reader and tag.

Nobel prize winner Steven Chu was chosen to be the U.S. Secretary of Energy.  His appointment still stands.  We’re glad the U.S. government listens to scientists on scientific matters at least some of the time!

2007

At this time five years ago, we were rolling out the first iteration of a DIY/ LED menorah…little did we know what was to come!

Hackaday offered their two cents about how to turn headphones from in-ear to on-ear.  Their hackey advice still holds for current headphone models.

2006

Andrew, an ITP student, created Moonwalking shoes that play Michael Jackson.

2004

On Hack-a-Day Phil offered us some insight on how to run GPS on a Macbook.  Remember those old keyboards and trackpads?  And when MacBook Pros came with a disc drive? Sigh…

The recent past:

December 20th marks the anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan in 1996.  Maybe he’s teleporting in the cosmos now…

HTML4 was published fifteen years ago today.  It was the first standardized version of HTML, which went through four versions between 1990 and 1997 and still is widely used today.  HTML5 is currently in working draft form and is slated to be released in stable form by the end of 2014.

The distant past:

…this small, sallow child, previously and subsequently named JJ Thomson, went on to discover electrons, isotopes and the mass spectrometer.  If only we could invite him to help us hack!

…and with no small degree of hometown pride (is this phrase applicable to New York?), Edwin Howard Armstrong invented the feedback circuit (pictured above) and FM radio in the basement of Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall.

Welcome to our new weekly feature Time travel Tuesday #timetravel – It’s a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world. Each week we’ll pick what was happening in the world of making – from what Adafruit was up to 1,2,3,4,5+ years ago, to stories around the web of yesteryear, to historic moments in science and beyond. As new team members join Adafruit they’ll be working on this feature so they can see where we’ve all been, with an eye to where we are going. Don’t worry – We’ll avoid paradoxes and if our calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour… you’re gonna see some serious… info

This week Ladyada & pt wind back the clock, let’s go BACK IN TIME – enjoy!

This time… @ Adafruit…

2011

We introduced the Adafruit Perma-Proto Full, 1/2 & 1/4 sized Breadboard PCBs. More cool skill badges (Hack-a-day!). And our weekly Show-and-tell event was really taking off. The Tweet-a-Watt won a Best IoT Open Source Project 2011. We had a sale on Tyler’s kit after meeting him on the Show-and-tell, Coolbro Geo. Tyler (and his brother Justin, soon after became Adafruit team members). They built the Adafruit Learning System with us. We were in full production mode for the iNecklace. View all 2011 December-ish posts here.

2010

“Hackers Take the Kinect to New Levels” – Microsoft was saber rattling Adafruit with legal threats while we published the Kinect USB protocols on GitHub for the Kinect Hack bounty. Adafruit Targets Tinkerers With ‘Open-Source’ Electronics Kits @ Bloomberg’s Entrepreneurs: Newsmakers section. Microsoft later stopped freaking out about the Kinect hacks “Microsoft is “perfectly comfortable with hobbyists taking advantage of that raw data”… This time was scary for us, Microsoft was initially making some threatening statements, but later fully embraced the maker community. View all 2010 December-ish posts here.

2009

The Adafruit team, Ladyada and pt were making kits, QAing and shipping around the clock and were broadcasting live on the net Chris Anderson (DIY drones, and at the time WIRED) was making the rounds with his talk “Atoms are the New Bits” Engadget did a Kindle etching video with Ladyada and pt. A fun mailbag (note from customer) with the Game-of-Life kit came in too. View all 2009 December-ish posts here.

Nathan Seidle, CEO of SparkFun was our special guest on Ask an Engineer.

2008

JJ Silver put up some youtube videos showing a dozen fun ways to use a drawdio kit. Not just drawing but painting, touching, kissing, with water, plants and people! This right around when Jay Silver, Ladyada, pt & Adafruit teamed up with Jay to make the kit we still sell to this day. View all 2008 December-ish posts here.

2007

Adafruit runs out of server bandwidth and more! Having outgrown LaughingSquid (after nearly a year of faithful service! 2006 to 2007) Ladyada & pt moved ladyada.net to ServInt. We still host everything with ServInt. View all 2007 December-ish posts here.

2006

Tattoos for your tech – Adafruit starts a laser-etching service to pay for our laser. We published the files, the business docs and everything so others could make their own laser businesses too. Around the same time, Ladyada ran 2 workshops for 10 people each where they built mintyboost kits. The event was the EYEBEAM 2006 Hackshop. View all 2006 December-ish posts here.

Photos from Adafruit, Ladyada & pt

2004 – We start using UPS shipping.
2006 – Ladyada working on the Wavebubble.
2008 – Collin on pt’s phone.
2009 – A nice gift came in from MakerBot & Waveshield proto.
2010 – Ask an Engineer show set up with Ladyada and pt.
2011 – Added Hack-a-day skill badge.
Adafruit Flickr archives here.

Makers & Hackers… in time

Time selected posts from MAKE – HP Goes Open Source for webOS, 2011. Students make vertical wooden roller coaster track, 2010. Open source hardware 2009 – The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009. Handmade Music night @ 3rd Ward in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2008. Nobel Physicist chosen to be Energy Secretary, 2008. Time hackers, 2007. Moonwalker shoes, 2006. Mass-Produced Individuality, 2005.

Time selected posts from Hack-a-Day – LUFA open source USB stack now for NXP ARM processors, 2011. Open Source Kinect contest has been won, 2010. EyeWriter open source eye tracking, 2009. Scratch built RFID tags, 2008. Upgrade your in-ear headphones, 2007. Bad boy charger, 2006. FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace, 2005. gps and director mx, 2004.

This time… in the Science, Maker world & beyond

Science

From “Today in Science” – In 1719, the first recorded sighting of the Aurora Borealis took place in New England. In 1888, African American inventor, H. Creamer was issued a U.S. patent for a Steam Trap Feeder (No. 394,463). Marie Curie picked up a second Nobel Prize in 1911. Last moon landing – In 1972, Apollo XVII astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed on the moon for a three-day exploration, which would be the final Apollo mission to the moon. Sir David Brewster was born 1781. Known for Brewster’s Law and later patented the kaleidoscope. Born 1863, Annie Jump Cannon deaf astronomer who specialized in the classification of stellar spectra.

This week in history

History.com has a great overview (and video) of world events from around this week…
Dec 11, 1936 – Edward VIII abdicates
Dec 12, 1980 – Da Vinci notebook sells for over 5 million
Dec 13, 2000 – Al Gore concedes presidential election
Dec 14, 1911 – Amundsen reaches South Pole
Dec 15, 2001 – Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens
Dec 16, 1773 – The Boston Tea Party
Dec 17, 1903 – First airplane flies

That’s it for this week time travelers, if we missing something notable, post up in the comments! Remember, if you travel long enough, you eventually meet yourself.