SketchSynth lets anyone create their own control panels with just a marker and a piece of paper. Once drawn, the controller sends Open Sound Control (OSC) messages to anything that can receive them; in this case, a simple synthesizer running in Pure Data. It’s a fun toy that also demonstrates the possibilities of adding digital interaction to sketched or otherwise non-digital interfaces.
NEW PRODUCT – Transistor Man Shirt! Did you know that inside every transistor is a little man whose job it is to watch the incoming base current and adjust the collector-emitter impedance to match the datasheet? Its true! And now you can celebrate the hard-working guy with this fabulous Transistor Man tee shirt.
Not only did we get a blessing to make these from Cambridge Press, we even got a scan of the original artwork transparency from Professor Hill! These are without a doubt, the coolest NPN shirts we’ve ever seen.
These shirts are directly printed onto high quality American Apparel T’s. The women’s are 100% cotton, the men’s sizes are a 50/50 poly-cotton blend. We find these shirts to be a little more expensive than the common ‘Hanes’ T’s but they’re much more comfortable and better fitting — especially the women’s sizes! All shirts are black with white ink. Please check the links above to American Apparel for detailed fitting information.
The Open Hardware Summit (OHS) invites submissions for the third annual summit, to be held on September 27, 2012 at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City. The Open Hardware Summit is a venue to present, discuss, and learn about open hardware of all kinds. The summit examines open hardware and its relation to other issues, such as software, design, business, law, and education. We are seeking submissions for talks, posters, and demos from individuals and groups working with open hardware and related areas. Submissions are due by May 31, 2012 BY 11:59pm (EST). Notification of accepted proposals will happen by July 8th, 2012.
Submission topics
Topics of interest for the summit include, but are not limited to:
Digital fabrication
DIY bio
Soft circuits
Wearables and fashion tech
Quantified-self hardware
Means of supporting collaboration and community interaction
On demand and low volume manufacturing
Distributed development and its relationship to physical goods
Software design tools (CAD / CAM)
DIY technology
Ways to share information about hardware that’s not captured in source files
Business models
Competition and collaboration
Sustainability of open hardware products (e.g. how to unmake things)
Industrial design
Open hardware in the enterprise
Specific product domains: e.g. science, agriculture, communications, medicine
Legal and intellectual property implications of open-source hardware
Open hardware in education
Addressing the gender imbalance in the open hardware community
And any other topic you think relates to openness and hardware. We want to hear all about it!
This year there are three types of proposals you can submit. You can propose a talk, a poster, or a project demo. The talk concept is self-explanatory. The demo sessions are just what they sound like: show off your open-hardware project! In case you need examples, here are two from last year by RobotGrrl and Chris Novello.
New for this year is the poster presentation concept — I think this has a lot of potential for sharing great ideas that might otherwise be missed. Posters fill the gap between project demos and talks. They’re less formal than plenary talks, but more conceptual (as opposed to hands-on) than demos. They give you a chance to exhibit a project or organization that you can’t physically present or which is beyond initial hardware design but not far enough along to be an auditorium presentation. If this sounds like you, consider submitting a poster presentation!
Check out this awesome Kickstarter project by the same guys that worked with Ladyada to develop the Drawdio. Take a MaKey MaKey controller, connect up some alligator clips to just about anything conductive, and interact with your computer and the internet.
Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple.
When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and webpages, because all programs and webpages take keyboard and mouse input.
Jonathan Feldman talks about the future of Open Source Hardware in a commentary for Information Week.
Those of us with gray hair remember when mainstream companies viewed open source software with extreme skepticism–that is, until it became apparent that the Internet backbone was running reliably on OSS. Now attention is turning to open source hardware.
Open source hardware? Really?
Really.
If you’ve been following the Maker Movement, you’re already in the loop. Just as many open source iterations and eyes changed the face of software, so it will go with hardware. Want to build a USB battery charger out of a mint container and other widely available components? Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada) to the rescue, with her “minty boost” USB charger.
Surely this movement is for hobbyists only, right? You don’t want to fork out $50 for a USB battery charger, so you fork out $20 for the kit and work on it with your buddies over the weekend.
Well, there’s a larger world out there. Like open source software, open source hardware started among hobbyists and will make its way into the corporation.
July 28+29 2012, 10am – 5pm, MQ, Vienna/Austria Info and registration: office@mqw.at Location: freiraum quartier21 INTERNATIONAL
Participants will experience first hand the making of Exquisite Electronics and produce their very own piece of hand-embroidered electronic Haute Couture. The workshop will cover traditional embroidery techniques, using contemporary conductive materials, such as conductive threads, fibers, fabrics and yarns, to create highly decorative circuitry with unique functionality.
The workshop not only introduces a range of e-textile techniques, but also draws attention to issues surrounding electronic textiles, such as e-waste, diminishing resources, the industrialization of craftsmanship and the impacts of globalization. By raising these topics we hope to start a discussion among the makers of electronic textiles in order to project a more futuristic future vision of skilled craftsmanship as it may be applied to electronics. The workshop will last 2 or more days and will be open to the general public. A maximum of 15 participants will be able to attend the workshop, and while previous experience working with either textiles or electronics is encouraged, the workshop is open to everybody eager to learn and master a new set of skills.
Last year I bought a Canon PowerShot SX200 on ebay. I wanted to play a bit with CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit to make some timelapse things. Problem was, the battery would hold only up for 2 hours or so. Even worse, the camera has no power jack to attach a power supply. The solution is to buy a battery dummy that has a jack on its back. That costs like 30 euros!
3D printing to the rescue!
This is exactly what makes home 3D printers so wonderful. Why spend $40 for an adapter, when you can make one for just a few dollars. Make sure to read the full article, as he has lots of great information and pictures.
Its been a while since I’ve posted, primarily cause I’ve been busy with finals. But in the midst of all that, my girlfriend and I made an LED dress for a fashion show that was at our university. The LEDs weren’t diffused so the light would shine on everything so it really grabbed the attention of everybody. It was run off of a 3.7v LiPo battery (which I clocked in at 4.0v).
Adafruit forums user EasternStarGeek posted some great new code for our 10K Precision Epoxy Thermistor.
My approach differs slightly in that I use a lookup table instead of the logarithmic formula given in the Adafruit tutorial. I didnt make any measurements, but it could very well run faster, since it doesn’t depend on a lot of complex floating-point math. In any case, Lookup tables are useful sometimes, and my example not only shows how to do a lookup, but also how to interpolate between the two closest entries to the measured value.
You will also find a helper spreadsheet that was used to create the LUT used in the sketch, along with some interesting charts that show graphically, the relationship between temperature and thermistor resistance, as well as temperature versus ADC voltage.
Need to measure something damp? This epoxy-coated precision 1% 10K thermistor is an inexpensive way to measure temperature in weather or liquids. The resistance in 25 °C is 10K (+- 1%). The resistance goes down as it gets warmer and goes up as it gets cooler. For specific temperature-to-resistance, check the lookup table.
These are often used for air conditioners, water lines, and other places where they can get damp. The PVC coating of the wires is good up to 105 °C so this isn’t good for very hot stuff.
We even toss in an additional 1% 10K resistor which you can use as calibration or for a resistor divider.
Another great episode of MakerBot TV, wherein you’ll get a preview of the robots in the DIY Robot Petting Zoo MakerBot’s got planned for this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California.
Lauszus posted a great video of his mbed based balancing robot on Youtube.
I have for a long time wanted to build a remote controllable balancing robot aka Segway – that’s was actually the main reason why I created the PS3 Bluetooth Library both for Arduino and the FEZ Devices. It has been a long time since the sneak peak and the performance has been improved a lot since then. The original one had a FEZ Rhino as the main processor, but I discovered that it was not fast enough to read the encoders, as it is not running embedded code. Also I was already using more than 10ms per loop, which I used as a fixed time loop, so I decided to step up a notch and go for a much more powerful device: the mbed microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 running 96MHz.
mbed + extras – LPC1768 development board [v5.1]. The mbed is a tool for rapid prototyping with microcontrollers using the beefy LPC1768 ARM Cortex M3 chip. While it looks like a classic breadboard-friendly breakout board, this dev board has a few tricks up its sleeve. First of all, underneath the PCB is a second LPC chip which acts as the programmer: when plugging into a USB port the mbed shows up as a flash drive and programs can be ‘dragged’ onto it for uploading. This makes it easy to program without an external device, and makes bricking impossible. There’s also a bunch of indicator LEDs, and a little flash storage chip as well.
Writing code for the mbed is a little different than you may be used to. Instead of downloading the IDE and installing it locally, the user must instead visit the http://mbed.org website and use the web-based ‘cloud’ programming system. Since the board is programmed via drag-n-drop, no software is installed. The good news is that it means its easy to work on anywhere you are just by logging on, and there’s a vibrant social network sharing code on the mbed site. The bad news is that Internet access is required to work on a project.
New users can get started with mbed tools in 60 seconds, by plugging in an mbed microcontroller, going to the mbed.org website to sign up, and downloading and running a “Hello World!” binary just like saving to a USB flash drive. Compiling a first program takes only 60 seconds more; Launch the browser-based compiler, create a new template project, click ‘compile’ to build and download the binary – there is nothing to configure or install, and everything works on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
For experienced users, mbed provides a fast way to create proof-of-concept designs in the early stages of development. For developers using older microcontrollers, discrete logic, or even those new to the industry, mbed removes the barriers to the world of modern 32-bit microcontrollers.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
FEED