NEW PRODUCT – Scratch – Skill badge, iron-on patch – You are learning Scratch! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting “badges” of achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share.
This is the “I made something using Scratch!” badge for use with educators, classrooms, workshops, Maker Faires, TechShops, Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and around the world to reward beginners on their skill building journey!
This beautiful badge is made in the USA.
The badge is skillfully designed and sturdily made to last a life time, the backing is iron-on but the badge can also be sewn on.
Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Vist the Scratch page.
Adafruit’s badges are manufactured in partnership with AMBRO Manufacturing located in NJ, USA. AMBRO is a family owned and operated business since 1990 that celebrates open-source with Adafruit Industries. You can meet their team here. AMBRO uses non-toxic soy based, water soluble and environmentally friendly printing supplies, threads and more when possible. AMBRO has over 250 solar panels that generate 50,000 Kilowatt hours per year. Their equipment runs solar powered, so the wonderful things AMBRO and Adafruit have worked together on are made with the sun! AMBRO Manufacturing was recognized by Impressions Magazine, a leading trade publication in the garment printing and embroidery business, who published an article highlighting AMBRO and their commitment to their environmentally focused manufacturing practices. Adafruit knows you have a lot of choices as to where you spend your money and time, we hope our open-source values, commitment to green technologies and partners helps make the decision easier and fun!
Here’s a 3D printed Hemispherical Omnidirectional Gimballed Drive system which you can make at home. That’s a mouthful which is why it is commonly referred to as a HOG drive. Never heard of one? Well you need to keep up with your Hackaday because about 20 months ago we featured this amazing robot project that uses one. The design is a tricycle orientation with the HOG drive as the only powered ‘wheel’. But it’s not really a wheel, it’s a half-sphere (a hemisphere which is not pictured above but attaches to the motor spindle) which can provide thrust in any direction depending on which way the motor is spinning a how the gimbal bracket is oriented.
Unfortunately [Dan] isn’t showing off a vehicle that is powered by the device just yet. But from what we’ve seen in the demo after the jump it is fully functional. His target project for the system is a line-following robot which we hope to post as a follow-up when he reaches that goal.
This is the first in our series of videos meant to spread the hacking goodness far and wide on the net. As you can see, it is a pretty silly video, hopefully you enjoyed the humor. This wouldn’t be hackaday without an appropriate writeup though!
TechCrunch Disrupt is the premier launching pad for start-ups. But for one special day, the event becomes a haven for amazing hardware startups. We want you to join us.
I love hardware. That’s why I want you guys to bring some of the coolest hardware projects imaginable to Disrupt NY this year. That’s why I want you guys in our Hardware Alley.
Hardware Alley is a one-day celebration of hardware start ups both young and old. The goal has always been to show off amazing hardware that we have written about over the past few months, as well as a few surprises. Last Disrupt we featured the guys from Thermovape, Makerbot, and Lit Motors. This year we want to fill Disrupt NYC with more amazing companies.
For more details on Disrupt head over here. We’re looking for new or even unlaunched products, as well as potential Kickstarter projects. Prototypes are fine as long as they’re amazing.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our amazing sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Some good news for fans of the popular mbed platform … the core libraries are now available on github under an open source license! You can read the announcement here, but this is good news for a platform that was already very easy to use and powerful, and this announcement will hopefully get people who might have been turned off but it’s semi-closed nature to take another look! Curious what it’s all about? You can grab an mbed right here and get started with ARM yourself today!
Today we take a look at an inexpensive pick ‘n’ place machine found on the Chinese auction site Taobao for 22800RMB (about $3,600). A pick and place is a machine that puts electronic components onto a circuit board that has been coated with solder paste. To complete the prototype you just place the populated PCB into a reflow oven. We hope it will speed up production of one-offs and single prototypes.
The NeoDen TM220A is a table top pick and place designed and manufactured in China. Most PnPs are huge machines that take up a room, but this fits nicely in the workshop. It doesn’t require a separate compressor, it has a noisy internal vacuum pump that provides suction for lifting parts.
Up to 15 reels of components can be loaded. 12 x 8mm, 2 x 12mm, and 1 x 16mm. A tray at the front holds larger components like chips. The bigger TM240A that has twice as many reels and costs $1000 more. For us the TM220A is the ideal size. More importantly, it’s light enough to carry up two flights of steep stairs into the workshop.
I’m new in the electronics world and I just discovered AdaFruit in December
when I found the Flora. Every time I went back to your website, I found
more and more stuff and information and tutorials and finally Ask an
Engineer and I keep telling my friends and family how GREAT the website is.
LadyAda, I’m old enough to be your mother, so I hope it’s okay for me to
tell you how proud and am of all you’ve done – I’m so inspired by your
intelligence and your ambition and drive….and I was so thrilled when you
were on with President Obama this week! What you’re doing is absolutely
wonderful, and yes, you are an inspiration to girls of all ages!
So I just wanted to send you a note to say Thank You and Congratulations! I
wish you continued success, you have a good heart and a good head and you’re
making the world a better place.
My heart’s full of hopes, science in my telescopes My screens are full of data that we ‘re always seeking Finding brave new worlds every week.
Gravity’s rainbow, Orbital dynamics make my brain glow. I sing with the satellites beyond our sky blue. There’s no finer thing that a technician can do.
Eyes of mankind, search among the stars to find Habitable planets where some day we’ll see Space controllers out there, just like me.
Arms of our galaxy, the joy of astroseismology, I discover planets that are extrasolar, that’s my noble calling as a space controller.
We study gleaming stars, we’re smarter than a hundred Apple Genius Bars. Any day we’ll bring the world a big surprise, pretty sure to win us all the Nobel Prize.
Kepler’s bright stars, celestial guitars I record the loops and tracks of orbit I’m the D.J. here, you’d better not ignore it!
This great timelapse controller takes advantage of the USB port on a Raspberry Pi and is a great demo of our LCD plate! From David Singleton:
A few weeks ago, I found this beautiful video on Youtube – a timelapse video of stars and the Milky Way. Seeing the stars appear to rotate overhead (due to the rotation of the Earth) and the intricate structure of our own galaxy gave me a profound feeling of the scale of the universe that we move through on spaceship Earth. Of course, I wanted to record my own Milky Way timelapse.
Capturing the Milky Way requires dark skies and long exposures, so this seemed like a great project to build using my fairly old Canon EOS 350D and Raspberry Pi. I also spent some time exploring what existing timelapse controllers can do – the holy grail of timelapse is to be able to capture sunset (and sunrise) seamlessly, where a wide range of shutter speeds need to be used to capture an appealing scene as the ambient light levels change profoundly. You can see at the end of the milky way video I linked above that sunrise is not handled so well! There are a number of scripts which can be run in-camera with homebrew firmware (e.g. chdk) but these cannot choose the best shutter speed based on the images taken – they have to guess the best values once there is too little light for the camera lightmeter to judge. Since we can run fully featured image processing software like ImageMagick on the Linux based Pi, I decided to build a controller which could capture sunset.
I also recently got hold of an Adafruit LCD Plate for my Pi so I’ve added a User Interface too.
I haven’t yet been able to make the Milky Way timelapse which is my end goal, but hope to do so in the coming weeks next time it’s dark, clear and I’m at Lake Tahoe, but the controller is working nicely.
Read on to find full instructions, some demo videos and the software so you can try it yourself.
A fun project after Pi hacking for NERP @ Pumping Station One, shared by Drew Fustini on Google+:
Ste was thirsty for OJ after NERP at Pumping Station: One so we figured out how to display orange on the Adafruit LCD Pi Plate. The I2C I/O chip doesn’t have PWM, so Python can only turn on/off red, green and blue. So we decided to switch between red and yellow quickly with a 3 to 2 ratio and our brains saw orange (although sadly my camera not so much).
Code snippet… very inefficient. my hope is this idea could be implemented properly with enough optimization to be useful
Adafruit RGB Positive 16×2 LCD+Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi: This new Adafruit Pi Plate makes it easy to use an RGB 16×2 Character LCD. We really like the RGB Character LCDs we stock in the shop. (For RGB we have RGB negative and RGB positive.) Unfortunately, these LCDs do require quite a few digital pins, 6 to control the LCD and then another 3 to control the RGB backlight for a total of 9 pins. That’s nearly all the GPIO available on a Pi! With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a Pi plate that lets you control a 16×2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the R-Pi! The best part is you don’t really lose those two pins either, since you can stick i2c-based sensors, RTCs, etc and have them share the I2C bus. This is a super slick way to add a display without all the wiring hassle. (read more)
SHOWTIME! Watch Ladyada with the President of the USA today at 4:50pm EST. Ladyada (Limor Fried) was selected to join President Obama in a Fireside Hangout this Thursday 2/14 at 4:50pm EST on Google+! Limor will be talking to the President LIVE about manufacturing, patents, education and more (hopefully!). Don’t forget to RSVP here for a reminder to tune in on Thursday- http://goo.gl/7pxfM.
Today is the big day! Ladyada (Limor Fried) was selected to join President Obama in a Fireside Hangout this Thursday 2/14 at 4:50pm EST on Google+! Limor will be talking to the President LIVE about manufacturing, patents, education and more (hopefully!). Don’t forget to RSVP here for a reminder to tune in on Thursday- http://goo.gl/7pxfM.
Learning Creative Learning is a course offered at the MIT Media Lab. It introduces ideas and strategies for designing technologies to support creative learning. This semester, for the first time, P2PU and the Media Lab are working together to bring the course online. We are opening up the seminars, course materials, and hands-on activities to anyone with a computer and Internet access. It’s a big experiment, we expect to learn a lot, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.
Some of our favorite educators are teaching a MOOC about learning! Be sure to check out the course listing to learn from Resnick, Ito, Dougherty, Mako, Rosenbaum, Amon and others!
We’ve updated the Adafruit Learning System with a new feature that should make it easier to gather all of the components needed to complete any particular guide.
Each guide contains a list of products that are used in order to complete the given steps. Previously, you would need to go to each product page, and add individual items to your cart. Now, as seen in the screenshot above, we’ve added the ability to add products directly to your cart from the guide you’re viewing.
We’ve also added the ability to add all of the products with a single button click! A few of the benefits are to ensure that you’re getting everything needed to complete the guide.
Also, we’ve added the ability to be notified of products that are out of stock, even if you’re adding all of the products to your cart using the one button at the bottom of the list.
And finally, there is an easy link to get to the shopping cart from right within the Learning System. This link is displayed anytime you have anything in your Adafruit shopping cart.
We hope these latest changes will make gathering the components to complete each each guide as easy as possible for you!
Check out this great “doomsday” clock project shared on the Adafruit Forums – with as many sources for accurate time and place as you could hope for! As the sources to keep this clock accurate go down, the person reading the clock knows that it is time to hit the bunkers and prepare for the end of the world. Check out the list further down for all of the awesome Adafruit gear used for this project, and read just below for notes from the Doomsday Atomic Alpha Clock Five project page:
I wanted a clock that would display precision time and date in “all” worst case scenarios.
If this clock does not show the precise time then its time to gather up food, water, ammunition,
and the family and head for the underground bunker!
This could happen – imagine this scenario ….
The World Wide Web (Internet) goes down.
All the US Military global positioning satellites (GPS) stops working.
The 60Khz WWVB pulse radio towers (Atomic clock) at Fort Collins, Colorado cease operation.
The electrical power grid cease to function.
All cellphone towers are in-operational.
All POS telephone land lines stop functioning.
All TV and cable systems are in-operational.
It’s the end of civilization … Doomsday! Do you have the precision time and date?
I may be dead and long gone but my Doomsday Atomic Alpha Clock Five would be still functional, working and indicating the precision time!
In this project, we used a GPS, a WiFi Electric IMP (network time), a custom built WWVB Atomic radio receiver, two precision TXCO real time clocks (+- 2 PPM SPI DS3234 and I2C DS3232) and two micro controllers – (Teensy 3 ARM stamp & Arduino 328P clone). We then use the three precision clock sources (UNIX seconds) to drive or sync to the Evil Mad Scientist huge, very bright, “Alpha Clock Five” 2.5″ clock display.
In our “DoomsDay Atomic Alpha Clock Five Project” we used a Ultimate GPS, a WiFi Electric IMP (network time), a WWVB Atomic radio receiver, two precision TXCO real time clocks (+- 2 PPM SPI DS3234 and I2C DS3232) and two microcontrollers – (Teensy 3 ARM stamp & Arduino 328P clone). We then use the three precision clock sources (UNIX seconds) to drive or sync to the Evil Mad Scientist huge, very bright, “Alpha Clock Five” 2.5″ clock display.
Raspberry Pi I2S driver: This gets us all sorts of excited about CODEC projects! From philpoole:
This repository contains a very poor quality I2S PCM ALSA driver for Raspberry Pi. It will output 16 bits per sample, 44100Hz stereo I2S to use with a DAC similar to the TDA1541A. If you require different format or frequency then feel free to modify this driver to suit, but I can’t guarantee support.
This is a kernel driver, so in order to build this, you will need to be running a successfully built kernel, for which you have the kernel source code to which this driver can be built against.
To build..
make -C /home/pi/linux M=$PWD
(if your linux source tree lives at /home/pi/linux, for instance)
It is a work in progress which I hope to continue in time.
The first version uses an IRQ to keep the PCM FIFO full.
However, there are glitches in the audio due to the sheer mass of interrupts.
I hope to improve that with time by using DMA.
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.
Be who you want to be. Follow your heart and don’t let anyone else tell you that you can’t chase your dreams. This blog is all about showcasing the awesome black folks who are Makers. As I travel around the USA, I am collecting stories of the kids and adults from the inner city to rural farms who are part of a long tradition of black Makers that represent a diversity of interests, talents, backgrounds, skills, geographic regions, hopes, dreams, desires, and goals. Share your story with me!
I’m Kipp Bradford. I teach engineering at Brown University. I’m also the founder and president of open-source hardware manufacturer kippkitts. I’m on the Technical Advisory Board of Make Magazine. My goal in life is to Make Makers. Why? That’s a great question. I believe that people who are Makers see the world’s problems as opportunities to create a new innovation. Makers are the engines of our economy and sources of inspiration forSTEAM education. Am I succeeding? Well, that’s hard to tell. There is certainly a lot more work to be done. Progress is being made though, and the movement is gaining momentum in schools and businesses. So I will continue to Make Makers and showcase some of the incredible Makers that I’ve come across in my life!
Throughout history, African Americans have invented some important and fun devices. Read about ten examples of men and women and see what they invented.Think about what kind of obstacles they may have faced, personally and professionally.
NSBE’s mission, “To increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community,” is now embraced by the nearly 30,000, and growing, number of active members of all racial backgrounds. This growth has been facilitated by the offerings in leadership training, professional and scholastic development, mentoring opportunities, community service programs and scholarship opportunities that NSBE provides.
Check out the latest, must-read 3D printing whitepaper by Michael Weinberg from Public Knowledge:
Today Public Knowledge is happy to announce a new whitepaper: What’s the Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing? This paper is something of a follow up to our previous 3D printing whitepaper It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology. Unlike It Will Be Awesome, which focused on the broad connection between intellectual property law and 3D printing, What’s the Deal? takes a deeper dive into the relationship between copyright and 3D printing.
A lot has changed since we released It Will Be Awesome. News outlets have discovered 3D printing. Rightsholders are issuing takedown notices. And Congress has started to take a look. At the same time, a lot has stayed the same. People are continuing to innovate to make home 3D printers better. Creators are pushing the limits as they design even more intricate 3D printed objects. And we are beginning to see the beginnings of physical remix artists.
But throughout this, people seem to keep coming back to copyright. As we note in the paper, part of this is a result of years of conditioning. Years of creating music, movies, and articles on computers have trained us all to automatically associate “digital” with “copyright,” and “disruptive digital” with “potential copyright problem.” But one of the gifts of 3D printing is that it brings digital into the physical world, where its connection to copyright is weaker. While this fraying may very well lead us to a new age of innovation, first we will need to retrain ourselves to stop assuming that everything is protected by copyright.
Of course, the first step in understanding what is not protected by copyright is recognizing what is protected by copyright. What’s the Deal? is designed to help mark those boundaries and draw focus to the hard – and easy – questions that the boundaries raise. Like It Will Be Awesome, What’s the Deal? is intended more as a conversation starter than a final word. Hopefully it will be a useful resource to the rapidly growing 3D printing community.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
According to the just-released Gallup-HOPE index for 2012, developing a world-changing invention is an aspiration shared by 42 percent of youth in grades 5-12. That’s good news. Given the scale of challenges facing us–in our own backyards and around the globe–it’s easy to see that we’re going to need every good idea the next generation has to offer.
What are schools doing to prepare today’s students to be tomorrow’s innovators?
In Mexico these days the project amounts to artistic subversion. At a time when the country’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is trying to recast Mexico as an economic marvel, with growth rates surpassing Brazil, Ms. Muñoz’s factory is a countervailing force — a mobile reality check highlighting Mexico’s darker economic truths.
Take wages. The minimum wage in Mexico is about 60 cents an hour, and while the average pay in manufacturing has grown over the past decade, it is still only about $3.50 an hour, according to government statistics. Even according to higher estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, Mexico’s hourly compensation costs are still only two-thirds of those found in Brazil, where the benefits of economic growth have helped a larger share of workers rise from poverty.
Economists recognize the problem. “We need to increase wages to become a true modern country,” said Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican government official who helped negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. But as Mexico tries to improve its image and gloss over its violent drug war, government officials have mostly described Mexico’s low wages in positive terms, as a way to compete with China. The market, it is generally assumed, will eventually drive up wages.
Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman – the oldest ever found. By looking at artefacts like this as works of art, rather than archaeological finds, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London hopes to help us see them and their creators with new eyes.
Human ancestors date back millions of years, but the earliest evidence of the human mind producing symbolic imagery as a form of creative expression cannot be much older than 100,000 years. That evidence comes from Africa: this exhibition explores the later dawning of representative art in Europe and shows that even before the remarkable paintings of the Lascaux cave, France, humans were able to make work as subtle as the expressive face above.
What will people 26,000 years from now think about the portraits we are making now?
Great panel today, thank you everyone who attended and asked great questions!
No matter what stage your business is in – just starting, recently launched, ready to scale – this year’s festival is designed for you. There is nothing more important to an entrepreneur than good information, sound advice, a supportive and generous community of peers, and great conversation. This year we focus on the nuts and bolts: what you need to know to make your business a success from people who have been where you are now.
The goal of the WE Festival remains the same. We hope to sow the seeds for a community of women entrepreneurs; to expose women who have not yet taken the entrepreneurial leap, the pre-entrepreneurs, to women who have.
Going To Scale – Your model is working. How do you elevate your company to the next level and scale? The entrepreneurs in this session will address the following: how to raise capital, how to outline your company roadmap, where to find the best talent, why company culture is critical, and more.
When I first got my Due in the mail I searched the web for a simple overview to help me better understand what new features Arduino is bringing to the table with the new development board. After finding next to nothing I decided to write my own general overview post in hopes that it would help out someone in a situation similar to mine. The Arduino Due is the first ARM-based development board from Arduino and features a powerful 32bit CortexM3 microcontroller. The board is fully programmable through the familiar Arduino IDE. The processing power is significantly increased over a traditional 8bit Arduino board and the coding language was kept very similar to what we are familiar with, making the transition to the new board very easy for most.
The Arduino Due shares a similar form factor to that of an Arduino Mega with the due having a few more pins, and two micro-USB ports instead of one. The Due sports 54 digital I/O pins of which 12 are PWM enabled, 12 Analog inputs, 4 UART’s, a USB-OTG capable connection, 2 DACs, 2 TWI, a JTAG header and SPI connector. An 84MHz clock fuels the CortexM3 engine and the boards operating voltage is 3.3v unlike the previous Uno, Leonardo, and Mega which all run on 5v. The Due is able to handle input voltages from 6-20V, but the recommended input voltage is between 7 and 12 volts. The total DC Current output on all I/O pins is 130mA while the current for the 3.3v and 5v pins is limited to 800mA. Because of the Atmel SAM3X8E’s 3.3v limit, existing Arduino shields that utilize 5v won’t work properly on the Due. Shields that utilize Arduino’s official R3 layout will work out of the box however.
It is important to note that using a shield that presents an input voltage greater than 3.3v to any of the I/O pins will damage that pin and could possibly (most likely) kill your Due all together. If you are unsure about a shield, I recommend that you fully read the shields data sheet, website documentation or contact the shields manufacturer before attempting to use it on your Due. Users have 512KB of flash memory to store their code in as well as two banks of SRAM totaling 96KB (Split into 64KB and 32KB). Compiling code for the Due is handled in the latest version of the Arduino IDE : Version 1.5, which will replace Arduino 1.0.1 after the testing phase completes.
Some wrap-up notes from a wearable electronics event and unconference held at Crash Space in combination with the LA Robotics Club!
We organized and hosted the LA Robotics Club this past Saturday Jan 19th for a Wearable Electronics Meetup. They’d been expressing interest in wearable electronics for quite awhile and it was a good excuse to open the space on beautiful Saturday afternoon.
We started will minimal expectations of an informal meet and greet, but around 70 people came. We had nearly 100 rsvps from different sources leading into the week of the event. free events are hard. arguably more work because you never know how many people will show up. The last thing I wanted to do was rent a room and not fill it… So, we went for it. we packed ‘em in tighter and brighter!….
Given the amount of folks that were planning to attending and our limited space, I went for an unconference like format. It went quite well with minimal upfront work. My aim was to most quickly get everyone in BOF sessions where the space would be less of a constraint.
We started with name tags and small talk until the room got full
Then we briefly when around and everyone shared what they hoped to gain. I created a bit of a session board and noted who might be an expert in fashioningTech or robots.
We then allowed anyone to share something with the complete group. This satisfied the need for those that came with a product of self promotion to get traction. This included projects, problems, techniques, questions, or ideas….
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Have you ever wanted to wear an Arduino on your wrist and tell the time with a giant LED matrix? Then you’ll love this three hour class at NYC Resistor that I’ll be teaching on February 9th. During the class you can learn how to solder through-hole components as we put together the Adafruit Timesquare DIY watch kit, and afterwards we will extend the watch firmware to add a new feature to the watch.
This class is a great introduction to soldering and some advanced embedded programming techniques. The coin-cell powered Timesquare watch isn’t exactly a normal Arduino and is very CPU limited, so techniques for limiting power consumption, waking up from deep sleep with interrupt handlers, low voltage brownout detection and some inline AVR assembly will be discussed. If you just want to learn to solder and have a very stylish wristwatch, you don’t have to stay for the walkthrough of the firmware.
Included in the class price for every student is a pre-programmed Adafruit Timesquare watch kit and an FTDI cable for re-programming it (a $49 value). You’ll need to bring your own laptop with the Arduino IDE installed to flash new firmware onto the device if you are staying for the advanced portion of the class.
The Raspberry Pi WebIDE includes an advanced, yet easy to use tool, to help you work through code that you’ve downloaded or written in Python.
If you haven’t used a debugger, either on the command line or in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), hopefully this guide will help you understand why you’d want to do so, and how to effectively debug your code.
Fascinating conceptual architecture problem that might well be possible to implement thanks to 3D printers, from 3Ders:
Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (39) from Universe Architecture in Amsterdam designed a one-piece building which will be built on a 3D printer. He hopes the so-called Landscape House can be printed out latest in year 2014.
“One surface folded in an endless möbius band. Floors transform into ceilings, inside into outside. Production with innovative 3D printing techniques. Architecture of continuity with an endless array of applicability.”
Ruijssenaars works together with mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs to develop this project using 3D printing technology. The idea is to print the building in pieces and then put them together to form a complete piece. It will take one and a half year to finish the project.
Ruijssenaars plans to print every piece in size of 6 x 9 meters using a massive 3D printer called D-Shape. Designed by Italian inventor Enrico Dini, the D-Shape is potentially capable of printing a two story building using thin layers of sand and an inorganic binder to build up its constructions. Will the result be strong enough?
Ruijssenaars says Dini has suggested to print out the form only. And this “contours” of the house will be then filled with fiber reinforced concrete to get the desired strength.
Together with a Dutch construction company, Ruijssenaars is working with Dini to realize the idea. “It will be the first 3D printed building in the world. I hope it can be opened to the public when it’s finished. “says Ruijssenaars.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Thank you for your quick service and quality products. I received the items yesterday and they are working perfectly! It was truly a “Geek Christmas”!!! The instructions on your website were clear, correct and easy to follow. I hope there are many transactions with your company in the upcoming months – PB
Limor Fried, founder of the New York DIY-invention powerhouse Adafruit Industries, Entrepreneur of 2012 – Keep your business focused on your passion, that’s where you’ll be able to lead your community. And per her own startup story, which she revealed on stage last week, you should also expect to take some risk. When Fried was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for grad school, she redirected $10,000 in tuition toward her business of making DIY kits for electronic devices. The hope was that by the time that MIT came knocking for those funds, which her parents fronted for her education, she’d have more than enough to pay. Lucky for her, she did – and she also had a pretty neat business to boot. Last year, the company netted $10 million in revenue selling the DIY kits.
So the latest big booster for the 3D printer revolution … Glenn Beck? Would be interesting to see a conversation between Mr. Beck and Mr. Pettis — certainly they would have a lot to say about hopes for manufacturing in the United States. But imagine a 2009-era Bre on the Glenn Beck show?
Glenn Beck has seen the future, and it is 3-D printed.
On Tuesday, he featured one of MakerBot’s Replicators on his radio show/online broadcast, making it clear that he was impressed by the desktop device.
“This can make anything,” he says as the machine diligently prints out a tiny shark model. He’s no less impressed by how easy it is to create the models for a print, too, pointing to Autodesk’s 123D Catch as an exemplar. “Now I can take a picture of anything and it will make it.”
While this isn’t — strictly speaking — true (Beck would do well to remember Steve Jobs’ famous dictum that design is how it works, not what it looks like), it’s not that different from what we hear from the most enthusiastic advocates for 3-D printing.
In the segment, Beck is quick to highlight the societal implications, worrying about what it could mean for patents, art and currency. But his main focus is on the means to use this kind of technology to restore American exceptionalism.
“Jobs will come back to America because you’ll be able to make things again, remember this is early technology here,” he says. “However, those aren’t manufacturing jobs, they aren’t labor union jobs, they aren’t dolt jobs, per se. You will be able to make anything you need. So our economy in the entire world is turned upside down. You don’t need little slave children in China to make stuff. The Replicator 2000 will do it for you.”
We’ve seen robots that can shoot baskets and kick soccer balls. How about one that can toss cookies? At least when “Vomiting Larry” tosses his cookies, he does so for science, via The Verge:
Meet “Vomiting Larry,” a humanoid robot that projectile vomits in the name of science. Developed by researchers at the Health and Safety Lab in Derbyshire, England, Larry was designed to help study the spread of the norovirus — an incredibly virulent gastrointestinal disease that experts describe as “the Ferrari of the virus world.” Researchers have spent more than 40 years looking for a cure for the norovirus, which can inflict often violent vomiting and diarrhea upon the 21 million Americans infected each year, but have thus far been unable to solve its riddle.
That’s where Larry comes in. Because the virus can be transmitted through tiny vomit particles, scientists are hoping to learn more about how it spreads with an anatomically correct “humanoid simulated vomiting system.” Each time Larry vomits, researchers can get a better idea of how far the aerosolized norovirus particles travel.
Normally, these particles would be invisible to the human eye, but Larry’s “vomitus substitute” includes fluorescent markers that help virologists pinpoint its reach; thus far, they’ve found that the disease can travel more than three meters with a single retch. They can also study how these particles interact with different surfaces, and whether different environments can effect the norovirus’ spread.
The hope, then, is that Larry will help doctors better contain the transmission of the disease, even if a vaccine remains elusive. Part of the problem is that researchers still don’t have a way to actually grow the norovirus in laboratory settings, making it difficult to get a full understanding of how it operates. The virus has also been known to mutate dramatically, which further complicates attempts to harness it.
“There are many strains, and the virus changes very rapidly – it undergoes something virologists call genetic drift,” said John Harris, a virus expert at Britain’s Health Protection Agency. “When it makes copies of itself, it makes mistakes in those copies – so each time you encounter the virus you may be encountering a slightly different one.”
Aeros has completed its experimental rigid variable-bouyancy airship and accomplished the first of four tasks under its contract with the Pentagon’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office.
Aeros CEO Igor Pasternak says the 230ft-long Aeroscraft prototype, called Pelican, has completed a ground-handling demonstration showing the 36,000lb vehicle can move without assistance from ground personnel, controlled from the cockpit and using its air-bearing landing gear. The Pelican was heavier than air for the demonstration, he says.
The three remaining contractual demonstrations, which Pasternak hopes to accomplish next week, include a vertical takeoff and offloading payload without taking on ballast — both accomplished solely by varying the vehicle’s buoyancy. The fourth demo is of the vehicle’s lightweight aeroshell, which does not rely on pressurization for rigidity.
The Aeroscraft controls its buoyancy by pumping helium between lifting-gas cells and pressurized tanks inside the composite aeroshell. Compressing the helium makes the vehicle heavier than air for easier ground handling and cargo unloading. Releasing the helium displaces air inside the vehicle and makes it neutrally buoyant.
The buoyancy control system can vary the Pelican’s “static heaviness” by 3,000-4,000lb, says Pasternak, enough to allow the prototype to take off vertically, yet be heavier than air for landing and unloading. All of the tests are taking place inside Aeros’ airship hangar in Tustin, California, with the vehicle expected to reach a height of 10-15ft.
Pasternak is hopeful of additional funding for follow-on testing that would take the prototype outside the hangar. The Pelican is configured for outdoor tests, he says, but might need some modifications to comply with FAA rules for flight testing. Ultimately, Aeros wants to build a 450ft-long vehicle able to carry a 66-ton payload over a 3,000nm unrefueled range.
The United States is one of the few countries left in the world who still have not converted to using the Metric System as a standardized system of measurement. Instead of going along with what the rest of the world uses, we stubbornly still adhere to using the imprecise Imperial Unit – despite the fact that practically every other country that we interact with uses Metric.
Why should we convert to using the Metric System? Because it’s superior, less convoluted – everything is ordered in units of tens, while the chaotic arrangement of the Imperial System slows things down for us – not only in terms of education, but also businesses, science, foreign relations, and daily life.
I “heart” METRIC – Requirements Sheet & skill badge.The Metric System is an international decimalised system of measurement. France was first to adopt a metric system, in 1799, and a metric system is now the official system of measurement, used in almost every country in the world. The United States is the only industrialised country that has not defined a metric system as its official system of measurement, although the use of a metric system has been sanctioned for use there since 1866. Although the United Kingdom committed to officially adopting a metric system for many measurement applications, one is still not in universal use there and the customary imperial system is still in common and widespread use. Although the originators intended to devise a system that was equally accessible to all, it proved necessary to use prototype units under the custody of government or other approved authorities as standards. Until 1875, control of the prototype units of measure was maintained by the French Government when it passed to an inter-governmental organisation – the Conférence générale des poids et mesures (CGPM). It is now hoped that the last of these prototypes can be retired by 2014 via Wikipedia.
Did you know all our badges are made in the USA *and* the embroidery machines use solar power! These badges are fueled by a star!
The manual is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported licence, which is a complicated way of saying that it’s free for you to download, copy, adapt and use – you just can’t sell it.
You’ll find chapters here on Scratch, Python, interfacing, and the command line. There’s a group at Oracle which is currently working with us on a faster Java virtual machine (JVM) for the Pi, and once that work’s done, chapters on Greenfoot and Geogebra will also be made available – we hope that’ll be very soon.
We want to say an enormous thank you to the whole CAS team, especially Andrew Hague, who corralled everything (and everyone) together as well as editing much of the document and writing a couple of the chapters. Thanks also to the team at Publicis Blueprint (beware! This link autoplays some video), who did more copy-editorial, production and typesetting work, all on a volunteer basis. Thank you to Graham Hastings, Michael Kölling, Ben Croston, Adrian Oldknow and Clive Beale, who wrote chapters of the manual; thank you to Bruce Nightingale, Brian Starkey and Alan Holt for the digital content. And thank you to the army of CAS members who worked so hard on reviewing and proofreading everything. Everybody who worked on this manual gave freely of their own time to make it happen, and we’re very, very grateful to you all.
The manual itself? It’s brilliant, and we think you’ll find it really useful.
The PDF can be downloaded on the Raspberry Pi site (PDF) and here is a mirror (PDF).
Here’s a nice, practical mounting frame for the GoPro Hero3 from Pete Prodoehl’s blog Rasterweb:
I like the acrylic housing that comes with the GoPro Hero3, but I tend to run some pretty long time lapses, and the battery doesn’t last long enough, so I made a lightweight frame, and it’s over on Thingiverse.
I’m (slowly) getting better at OpenSCAD, thanks to projects like this. I’m sure I’ll get even better in 2013.
I’ve got plenty of long USB cables and USB power supplies, as well as a Minty Boost from Adafruit to provide power for shooting hours and days at a time.
Here’s a quick time-lapse test I shot before I had the frame. I ended up balancing the GoPro on a book on top of two water bottles, which was silly, and just one more reason for this thing.
The frame has a bit of flex to it so you can easily wrap it around the camera. I may play around with some thicker housings, but for now, it does the job.
I ended up printing about 6 versions before I got one that was good. I should probably do more paper prototyping, but with how easy it is to 3D print things, sometimes you just hit “print” and hope for the best. If it doesn’t work out, you tweak things and try again. It’s just the way it works.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Above is a video Ford posted to Youtube with a Ford engineer explaining how he uses a Makerbot Replicator to do fast prototyping. Stacey Higginbotham, writing for Gigaom, got in contact with Ford and asked how many engineers currently have access to a Makerbot.
A Ford spokesman told me that while it’s tough to give an exact count on the number of employees who have the 3-D printers, the company has multiple locations at the company’s Dearborn, Mich. headquarters where hundreds of engineers have access. And at the carmaker’s Silicon Valley Lab in Palo Alto all employees have Makerbots. The most popular areas they are in use today at Ford are in the Vehicle Design and Infotronics group.
This is great to see Ford engineers embracing an open source solution for something like this. Hopefully with the wealth of knowledge over at Ford, they will be able to give back to the community in some way.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Late last night while his kids were asleep waiting for Santa, maker and designer Jason Welsh (who just this week shared with us the cool Pi Command Center) was up tuning and tweaking his IR proximity sensing Arduino Book Case robot. Check out the latest progress for this cute little bot. Hope the kids had fun with it zipping around them today!
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!
With four 3D printers (so far) in-house, a new staff member from the heart of the 3D community, and #3dthursday, Adafruit has started getting into desktop 3D printing in a big way, especially where these fabrication tools interface with electronics!
Desktop 3D printers excel in the creation of custom enclosures for compact, dedicated electronics projects. We had seen Jason Welsh’s outstanding Folding Arduino Lab (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32839) when it launched this past fall and reached out to him with a special challenge — to create a practical, modular case for the Raspberry Pi to share with our community!
Jason Welsh who created this design can be found on thingiverse at http://www.thingiverse.com/jasonwelsh, check out his other designs there. He also operates a youtube channel where he instructs many in the field of 3D Modeling, Design and Electronics, which can be found here http://www.youtube.com/cannedmushrooms. He invites you to come on by anytime and learn some new tricks.
Jason Welsh: “I hope this design helps you expand your imagination and guides you in all manner of nerdy ways while dishing out your Pi.”
A walkthrough for the New York Shapeways facility! Via Forbes.com.
If Santa replaced his elves with refrigerator-sized machines that digitally assemble toys out of nylon dust and lasers, his workshop might look something like this.
In October, 3D-printing startup Shapeways opened its New York production facility in Long Island City, Queens, the biggest consumer-focused 3D printing factory in the world. When I visited the site last week–at the height of its holiday frenzy–the startup had already installed nine industrial-sized 3D printers turning digital blueprints into solid physical objects at its fastest rate ever: In 2012 it printed more than a million items, well over its total for all prior years combined since the company launched in 2008. And by the holiday season of 2013 it hopes to have more than 50 printers filling its 25,000 feet of floor space.
Consumer 3D printers like Makerbot’s Replicator 2 or the open-source RepRap have just begun to edge into mainstream awareness. But for those not yet willing to shell out thousands of dollars for their own home 3D-printer, Shapeways offers another path to bring software models into reality, asking consumers and retailers to upload their designs shipping the results back to them, printed on high-end machines with a level of precision and in materials that no consumer 3D printer can yet achieve.
I spoke with Shapeways’ designer evangelist Duann Scott about that 3D-printing-as-a-service model, which has already raised $17.2 million in venture capital, in the video above. And below is a tour in photos of the company’s Queens factory–one that Scott argues offers a peek into the future of U.S. manufacturing.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
I bike almost everyday in New York City. Because of work and school, I am often on the road late at night so road safety is a big concern. But even with LED headlights and taillights (as required by law), drivers seldom seem to pay much attention to those who travel on two wheels.
The Heart Bike Jacket is designed to bring a level of human-ness to my bike gear. By mimicking the shape of a real human heart, I hope to remind drivers behind me that I’m not just a nuisance on the road; I’m also a living human being, subject to the hazards of the road and much less protected than the driver.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Here’s a project from Electrical and Computer Engineering students from Cornell tackling the classic glove-mouse project. Not particularly streetwear ready at this point, but what they explored as far as integration into natural hand movements should prove useful reading for wearables designers.
For our ECE 4760 final project, we designed and built a wireless computer pointing device with accelerometer based movement control. Our implementation allows the user to wear a set of hardware (a glove and connected armband) and control a cursor through different hand orientations and finger presses. Users can operate their computers with their hands in midair without the hassle of desks surfaces or wires.
This system connects to an computer using standard USB and supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
Rationale and Inspiration
While brainstorming an idea for our final project, we decided to base our project idea around what we enjoy most about Electrical and Computer Engineering: computers. We felt that it would be interesting to somehow design a microcontroller based project which could somehow interface or communicate with our own personal computers.
Additionally, we were originally inspired by a specific last project from the previous semester: a sign language translating sensor glove. This device was able to sense hand gestures and map them from a sign language alphabet to a standard English alphabet. With the thoughts of computer interfacing and hand motion in mind, we came up with this project idea.
The motivation for this project was to create an intuitive glove-based pointing device for multiple applications. The hope was to be able to create not just a working project but a fully-developed device in terms of intuitive functionality and practical, usable features.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Check out this incredibly cool project Adventure Box Proejct that not only is a great Arduino-powered vending machine, but is also a place to discover a huge range of hand-made toys contributed by the artists and designers participating:
Adventure Box started when some friends wondered, “How awesome would it be to have a vending machine filled with hand-made toys?” The idea grew and became an interactive art project, one that dispenses a hand-crafted mystery to those who discover it. This project was conceived as a merging of digital and physical interaction – each half working together to create a magical experience.
Each toy is made in a limited batches by friends and local artists. They are designed to inspire adventure when received, either conceptually or aesthetically. Every toy has its own entry on this site, where there is more information about the artist and how they made the toy. We hope to inspire others to create their own adventures just as we have.
Adventure Box is a combination of many different online, and offline, technologies. The vending machine’s brains lie within an Arduino Mega. This allows a program that reacts to inputs and dictates appropriate outputs.
The machine contains LEDs and speakers that provide user feedback when it is used. Each toy capsule contains a RFID chip with a unique identifying code. When the capsule comes down the chute, RFID readers attached to the machine scan the chip inside the capsule. The code is then sent to an online database which in turn passes information about that toy back to the machine which is displayed on a LCD screen. The machine then sends a tweet from the @ToyBoxProject account and marking the toy as “sold”. The database is also used to generate the grid of toys on this website, which can be searched using the code that comes with the toy.
If you are interested in the build process or more information about the technology, please check out the project blog.
We’ve been amazed by the variety of software that people have written for, or ported to, the Raspberry Pi. Today, together with our friends at IndieCityand Velocix, we’re launching the Pi Store to make it easier for developers of all ages to share their games, applications, tools and tutorials with the rest of the community. The Pi Store will, we hope, become a one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi needs; it’s also an easier way into the Raspberry Pi experience for total beginners, who will find everything they need to get going in one place, for free.
The store runs as an X application under Raspbian, and allows users to download content, and to upload their own content for moderation and release. At launch, we have 23 free titles in the store, ranging from utilities like LibreOffice and Asterisk to classic games like Freeciv and OpenTTDand Raspberry Pi exclusive Iridium Rising. We also have one piece of commercial content: the excellent Storm in a Teacup from Cobra Mobile.
I imagine I’ll be adding to the animations over the holidays and will hopefully get some video of the tree in action. In the meantime it’ll be accompanying me on my holiday traveling and visiting.
I’m happy w/ the crafty look of the tree as it reminds me of a wooden tree my mom made for me some years back with traditional incandescent string lights. Next year I’ll start work earlier on some fancy laser-cut versions
RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each RGB LED and controller chip is molded into a ‘dot’ of silicone. The dots are weatherproof and rugged. There are four flanges molded in so that you can ‘push’ them into a 12mm drill hole in any material up to 1.5mm/0.06″ thick. They’re typically used to make outdoor signs. We also have flat-backed pixels that are essentially the same, but are not as long and thin.
Here is some art from the Google+ Adafruit community. When we made this community on G+’s new community section we wanted to celebrate science, technology, engineering, math and art – so we made sure we had a section that celebrates all the great artists who want to share their work in the new experiment. Above is a video snapshot from just a few moments ago (12/14/2012 6am, 17,457 community members).
NEW PRODUCT – Raspberry Pi® – Sticker! They’re here! Raspberry Pi® stickers! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting stickers to achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a sticker is just one of the many ways to show and share.
This is the official (and approved by the foundation) Raspberry Pi® sticker for use with educators, classrooms, workshops, Maker Faires, TechShops, Hackerspaces, Makerspaces and around the world to reward beginners on their skill building journey!
Perfect for laptops or the workbench.
These gorgeous stickers are glossy, vinyl and made to last a lifetime. Made with printing/vinyl machines that are solar powered and using the most green friendly supplies as possible.
MADE IN THE USA!
Raspberry Pi® is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Created with permission from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. A portion of the sale goes to the Raspberry Pi Foundation www.raspberrypi.org
Adafruit’s stickers are manufactured in partnership with AMBRO Manufacturing located in NJ, USA. AMBRO is a family owned and operated business since 1990 that celebrates open-source with Adafruit Industries. You can meet their team here. AMBRO uses non-toxic soy based, water soluble and environmentally friendly printing supplies, threads and more when possible. AMBRO has over 250 solar panels that generate 50,000 Kilowatt hours per year. Their equipment runs solar powered, so the wonderful things AMBRO and Adafruit have worked together on are made with the sun! AMBRO Manufacturing was recognized by Impressions Magazine, a leading trade publication in the garment printing and embroidery business, who published an article highlighting AMBRO and their commitment to their environmentally focused manufacturing practices. Adafruit knows you have a lot of choices as to where you spend your money and time, we hope our open-source values, commitment to green technologies and partners helps make the decision easier and fun!
Hi, I’m johngineer, and this is my 971st blog post (!) here on Adafruit. I’ve been doing this blog thing for quite some time, but this post marks a new milestone — it’s my first post as a full-time employee.
Specifically, I’m the new Director of Imaging, which means I’ll be working on all the photography that we share with the world to make it the best that it can be. I’ll be shooting behind-the-scenes photos and videos too, new product images, and all kinds of other stuff.
I’m also on the technical staff, so I’ll be working on new hardware designs with LadyAda, continuing my work on the Fritzing library, making cool projects, and generally doing fun technical work that (hopefully) wins hearts and minds.
[John will be on Ask an Engineer this weekend too!]
Printable catalog (PDF)
At least when “Vomiting Larry” tosses his cookies, he does so for science, via 
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