Epilog Laser, the leading producer of CO2 and fiber laser engraving, cutting and marking systems today announced the company is teaming with Adafruit Industries to sponsor the iPad Contest, presented by Gizmodo.

“Engraving tech-gadgets is unbelievably popular right now”. Beginning March 15, Gizmodo will start accepting design entries for possible laser engraving on the highly-anticipated iPad. Two winners will be selected and each will receive a laser engraved iPad featuring each participant’s respective design. Finalists will be picked by the Gizmodo staff, Adafruit and Epilog. After the top 10 are selected, Gizmodo readers will vote for the two grand-prize winners. Adafruit will donate the engraving services on their Epilog Laser, and Epilog will donate the iPads for the contest.

“Engraving tech-gadgets is unbelievably popular right now,” said Mike Dean, director of sales and marketing for Epilog Laser. “We’re happy to donate the iPads for the competition and are excited to team with Gizmodo and Adafruit. It’s a perfect fit because we can connect with people who really understand what our product can do – the designers, the DIY crowd, the inventors – all of those who genuinely appreciate what lasers are capable of.”

The iPad Contest opens March 15 and runs through midnight PDT April 3. The competition is open to all U.S. residents 18 and older. Complete rules can be found at gizmodo.com and adafruit.com. For more information visit www.epiloglaser.com.

Pi, Greek letter (), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th. Pi = 3.1415926535…
With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.

Pi trivet above.

Today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday

This week we’ll go through some more of chapters one of the books we stock “Make: Electronics by Charles Platt” We checked out this book before putting it in the shop, its geared towards ultimate-beginners and teaches electronics starting from basic core of analog to some digital to microcontrollers. You’ll learn tools, prototyping soldering techniques, transistors, 555’s, etc. while completing useful projects. A nice and tidy intro! This book is a good accompaniment to learning microcontrollers/Arduino in that it fills the necessary electronics theory and background.

Topics include:

• A Maker Business: Adafruit Industries how it’s made – an open source hardware company in NYC
• jwz – XDaliChron! (video).
• Finding Ada sale March 24th – Bringing women in technology to the fore
• Now in the Adafruit store – The Bus Pirate – v3a

Chat details!

• Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
• Or visit our Ustream page
• For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-tos here and here
• We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
• There will be a trivia question at the end of the night as always!
• Lastly, if anyone can save a text log we’d appreciate it

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…

“Dali Clock is a digital clock. When a digit changes, it “melts” into its new shape. The date is displayed when the mouse is pressed. The window can be made transparent, and can do funky psychedelic color cycling. ”

Firmware is on github, have fun! Another great clock for the MONOCHRON – (m4v video).

The first light-emitting diodes went on sale in 1962, and you could have any kind you wanted as long as it was dim and red. Green, yellow and orange came next, but blue LEDs didn’t debut until 1989. So it may surprise you that the first LEDs, discovered in 1907, included blue—and were made of sandpaper.

And…

MAKE presents: The LED..

You’ve got your components, and your datasheet, and you’re read to start hacking. But which way does the chip go? Pin 23 is where? If you’re lucky, the orientation is clearly marked, or perhaps diagrammed in the datasheet. But if it isn’t, or if you’re simply new at this, it’s helpful to know what to look for.

Read more!

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.

This code will be live on March 24th.

The United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has warned that the software included in the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access. In an advisory, the US-CERT warned that he installer for the Energizer DUO software places the file UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory. An attacker is able to remotely control a system, including the ability to list directories, send and receive files, and execute programs. The backdoor operates with the privileges of the logged-on user.

This is the best reason to pick an open source charger of any kind, like the MintyBoost (not batteries, just devices until the new version . The MintyBoost will not install software and not trojan your computer.

The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips. Many serial protocols are supported at 0-5.5volts, more can be added. Adafruit is an official US distributor of Ian Lesnet’s Bus Pirate, each purchase directly supports Dangerous Prototypes! Remember, you are directly supporting the maker when you purchase from Adafruit!

Protocols:
1-Wire, I2C, SPI, JTAG, asynchronous serial (UART), MIDI, PC keyboard, HD44780 LCDs, and generic 2- and 3-wire libraries for custom protocols.

Features:

• USB interface, USB powered
• 0-5.5volt tolerant pins
• 0-6volt measurement probe
• 1Hz-40MHz frequency measurement
• 1kHz – 4MHz pulse-width modulator, frequency generator
• On-board multi-voltage pull-up resistors
• On-board 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies with software reset
• Macros for common operations
• Bus traffic sniffers (SPI, I2C)
• A bootloader for easy USB firmware updates
• Transparent USB->serial bridge mode
• 10Hz-1MHz low-speed logic analyzer
• Custom support in AVRDUDE, Flashrom
• AVR STK500 v2 programmer clone
• Scriptable from Perl, Python, etc.
• Translations (currently Spanish and Italian)

We also have Bus pirate basic probe sets! This is a interface cable designed for Bus Pirate which can makes it easier to connect the Bus Pirate to a circuit and get hacking!

This upcoming Tuesday, 9 March 2010, 8pm at Crash Space in Culver City, we’ll be having some fun quick DIY projects for you to build. Come on over and have fun with us. The project kits are $5 for CrashSpace members or $10 for non-members and you can take them home after you build them.

SMEEON writes…

Finally got around to adding together some video clips I took. I had a lot of people asking about what it does and how, so here is a little walk through.

Photos here!

This is exactly what we made the Waveshield for. And this is exactly vodka and cranberry juice was made for.

This was an attempt to make a small furnace that could be used for semiconductors and fusing fiber optics. It didn’t work so well, but it might be worth trying again in the future.

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.

Topics include:

• Temperature sensors
• Enclosures
• MintyBoost plus (assembled)
• MONOCHRON hacks and mods
• W0z

Chat details!

• Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
• Or visit our Ustream page
• For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-tos here and here
• We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
• There will be a trivia question at the end of the night as always!
• Lastly, if anyone can save a text log we’d appreciate it

Here’s INTRUDERCHRON by dataman – photos and video – just one of the many projects you can do with the open source hackable MONOCHRON clock kit! The time (1:30, date 03/05)… (m4v).

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…

We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Good times…

Oh for the curious, we’re trying out the Hovercam 500 to do this… so far so good, place document, click, email. We’re going to use it for overhead video on “Ask an Engineer” this week.

Today we’re excited to introduce the Google PowerMeter API on code.google.com, for developers interested in integrating with Google PowerMeter. This API will allow device manufacturers to build home energy monitoring devices that work with Google PowerMeter. We’re launching this API in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.

In today’s launch of the API on code.google.com we are highlighting the core design principles towards integrating with Google PowerMeter. In particular we outline the underlying data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user’s privacy and control on access to the information. We also highlight, with code samples and client implementations, how to easily start building your PowerMeter-compatible device.

Make: Online : Collin’s Lab: Kit-making with a very kind shout out!

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.

Thanks Collin!

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.

See you back here on the 24th!

Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone? After all, it’s possible today to design a device — including its electrical and mechanical architecture — on a personal computer with CAD and schematic design software, order nearly all the components needed for it online, and then process the manufacturing of a prototype through a low-cost supplier. So the idea of organizing an open-source project online to build a device isn’t far-fetched, nor is it one that requires millions in start-up funding. But can such gadgets succeed against those developed by established commercial manufacturers with deep pockets? Mark Driver, a Gartner analyst who specializes in open source, thinks that open-source gadgets have the best chance in markets where the technology has matured to the point that it is commonplace.

Check out the article, post comments here

Eric Von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, noted that “only 5 percent of these types of cases actually go through the judicial system.” Even for a company like Apple, he said, they are just too expensive.

Mr. Von Hippel also said that these lawsuits pointed to a bigger problem with the patent system. “It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it,” he said. “The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”

dcuartielles writes…

March 2010, Elektor’s English edition brings an article on 20 Open Source Tools. Arduino is featured as the first one of a series of tools that we all admire. It is really nice to be featured in Elektor (though I know it is not the first time, there have been several articles before where readers were using the Arduino board to develop their projects). This same issue brings a very interesting article titled Small & Open Source embedded operating systems that can run on AVR … this means you could probably run many of those small OS on one of the Arduino board models.

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.

A sordid tale, starting in the bedroom, involving batteries, deceit, cheap tricks, LEDs, and a pot. We came across an interesting oddity from the realm of consumer electronics: a fake seven-segment LED display. Just for fun, we made our own version too…

Don’t worry, Rachel’s is here. This store is for electronic hobbyists, DIY enthusiasts, hackers and triple Es. We specialize in breaking out oddly usefully microchips and designing custom kits. Our primary mission is to educate our customers and provide the clearest documentation of our products and their implementation.

Update: Looks like the site down. Check back later.

Massimo, David, Tom, Gianluca and David are meeting up in New York City in mid-March, and we want to see you.  We’re planning a get-together on March 20 with folks from the Arduino community. We hope to have a daytime meet-up to see each other’s work, trade tips on Arduino and talk about 1.0, and an evening of drinks somewhere as well. In order to do that, we need a head count so we can pick a place.  If you’re interested and can make it that day, email uno@arduino.cc.  When we have a general idea of how many people can make it, we’ll post a place and some details.

Picture via Wurx.

This instrument is a new version of one that I did a couple of years ago, the FM kbrd. This version was designed to be more portable (size and weight), to last longer (built out of proper wood),to sound better (in-built speakers + Audio outputs) and with a bigger variety of controls, amongst other things. Consists of: 6 Radios, 6 Keys, 6 Tunning dials, 6 Volume controls, 6 AM/FM switches, 6 LED lights, 6 antenas, 6 audio outputs and 1 power socket. It was built in November / December 2009

I am big Mark Jenkins fan. I often look at the photos on his website and wonder what it might be like to be made of quality 3M product. For my Off The Roll submission I wanted to create a sculpture which explores everyday life…. when you’re made of tape.