FLORA – Wearable electronic platform: Arduino-compatible – For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit’s community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers. After months of planning, designing and working with partners around the world for the best materials and accessories, we can share what we’re up to. The hardware is now shipping! We call it the FLORA. (read more)
The BeagleBone Black is unique in that it has quite a few pins that are available on easy to use pin headers, as well as being a fairly powerful little system. There are 2 x 46 pins available (well, not all of them are, but we’ll get to that later) to use.
Some of the functionality that is available:
7 Analog Pins
65 Digital Pins at 3.3V
2x I2C
2x SPI
2x CAN Bus
4 Timers
4x UART
8x PWM
A/D Converter
Quite the feature list! The Adafruit BeagleBone IO Python library doesn’t support all of them, but we hope to add more as we go.
We’ve released a new library that anyone owning a BeagleBone may find useful. It’s a Python library to interface with the pinouts of the BeagleBone. It’s designed to work very similarly to the RPi.GPIO library (originally forked from it!) for those of you that are familiar with that library on the Raspberry Pi.
The library was built and tested with the BeagleBone Black using the Angstrom Distribution on a Linux 3.8+ kernel.
You can access the library at our GitHub repository, and we’ll be releasing a tutorial soon to illustrate how to easily install, and use the library with your BeagleBone hardware.
The Robo-Raven, as the solar-powered, remotely piloted surveillance aircraft is called, was designed and built at the University of Maryland’s Maryland Robotics Center — an interdisciplinary research establishment in the university’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. The center posted a video of a test flight this week.
The Robo-Raven “already attracts attention from birds in the area which tends to hide its presence,” said John Gerdes, a mechanical engineer with the Vehicle Technology Directorate at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
Seagulls, songbirds and sometimes crows tend to try to fly in formation with the robotic bird during testing, but birds of prey, such as falcons and hawks, take a much more aggressive approach, he said.
“Generally we don’t see them coming,” Mr. Gerdes said on the center’s website. “They will dive and attack by hitting the bird from above with their talons, then they typically fly away.”
The Robo-Raven’s wings flap completely independently of each other and “can be programmed to perform any desired motion,” enabling the bird to carry out aerobatic flight maneuvers, such as diving and rolling, never before possible.
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!
With the hoards of MakerBot Customizer items and a huge influx of new users, the Thingiverse is expanding at a more rapid pace than ever before. And they just hit the 100,000th Thing milestone, per the MakerBot blog:
We just marked a major milestone at MakerBot with the 100,000th thing being published to Thingiverse! We’ve seen quite an explosion of uploaded and published 3D designs to Thingiverse since we launched the Customizer App in January of this year. Just take a look at how the numbers of available 3D designs on Thingiverse have been rising steadily – from 35,000 items on Thingiverse in January 2013 – before the Customizer was launched – to 60,000 two months ago, and 80,000 a month ago. And now, 100,000+ things!! And, downloads are more than 21.1 million!! That’s a lot of designing and printing of 3D items. The Next Industrial Revolution has begun.
The honor of becoming Thingiverse’s 100,000th published thing goes to Thingiverse user jg952 for the “My Customized Message Keychain.” We think this is great – and we can’t wait to see the numbers of published 3D designs expand even further. Check out all of the interesting 3D designs on Thingiverse at Thingiverse.com and give some props to Thingiverse user jg952 while you’re at it.
For many small projects, its cheaper and easier to DIY a boost converter than to buy a specialty chip. DIY converters are usually not as efficient but they’re quick & cheap!
NEW PRODUCT – Bare Conductive Greeting Card Kit – Classroom pack. This is a lovely way to get an entire classroom of up to 30 students started with Bare Conductive paint, with three fun electronic greeting cards. There are 30 card kits, 3 each of 10 different cute robot designs and 10 each of 3 different colored blinking LEDs. Use the included 10 mL pens to draw traces and connect components on the front of the card.
Comes with: 30 x cards, 10 x 10mL Bare Conductive pen, 30 x auto-flashing red, green or blue LEDs, 30 x 3v coin batteries. Each card has basic instructions on it and there’s an teachers guide and additional CD with more information.
Bare Conductive Paint is a multipurpose electrically conductive material perfect for all of your DIY projects! Bare Paint is water based, nontoxic and dries at room temperature.
Bare Paint is the first non-toxic electrically conductive paint available to consumers today. This unique child-friendly material is designed for people of all ages to explore and learn about electronics with an inclusive, easy-to-use material.
Bare Paint provides a dramatically different method of interacting with electronics as it can be applied to almost any surface, including cardboard, paper, wood, wallpaper, walls, textiles, and some plastics.
Bare paint can be used to replace conventional acid etching, making it a great electronics prototyping tool. Nontoxic and water-soluble, Bare Paint can be used without gloves or mask. The paint dries quickly at room temperature, and can be removed with soap and water. This means it’s also not water-proof or weather-resistant!
Application Methods Include: painting, screen printing & spray painting among others. Despite being called “Bare” conductive, it’s meant not for use on bare skin.
These are just 2 of our distributors in the Asia region, make sure to visit the Adafruit distributor page to view all! We will be spotlighting Adafruit resellers from around the world on a regular basis!
We recently updated our distributor, reseller and hackerspace pricing! Now, 1 quantity has UP TO a 30% discount off many items, this is allows you to get a great discount by just ordering 1 of something. Great for folks who just want to try 1 item of each of something out in their store, etc. As always, once you order 50+ or more of something the discount goes UP TO 40% off many items as well. Note! *Not ALL items have reseller pricing, reseller pricing is for items we can discount for our resellers. We are adding more all the time! Remember, the minimum order is $250 per order, not including shipping.
We have a very easy reseller program and would love to have more great people & companies as a distributors/resellers/hackerspaces. Our products are high-quality and we think they’re the best engineered & designed in the market. How can you be a distributor? Just fill our form here, keep in mind the following questions!
Are you an online store, a physical store or a hackerspace that would like to distribute our products? Please include a link.
Can you place orders $250 and over (Not including shipping) each time?
Can you pay via paypal or credit card? For international large orders, can you pay via wire transfer?
Do you have a UPS account? (This is not required, but helpful).
We’ll be adding more features for resellers in 2013 enjoy! To become a distributor, click here.
Voltaic Systems designs portable power systems to power electronics: from cell phones to tablets and laptops. We’re looking for someone to help with a wide range of technical responsibilities.
1. Test incoming components for quality and compatibility with a wide range of electronics.
2. Assist with product design and development across a range of new products in our pipeline
3. Respond to and resolve incoming technical requests. These can range from simple charge compatibility, to troubleshooting products in the field to more complex questions from customers looking to build custom solutions with our panels. In every case, we need someone who can solve problems quickly and can be clear and friendly via email and the phone.
4. Evaluating customer returns for problems and making suggestions about how to improve the product design.
5. Occasional days at our warehouse to test and manage inventory
6. There are actually a lot more options to pursue (we’re a growing company), but it sort of depends on what your interests are.
Requirements
- Proficient in basic electric circuitry and testing equipment whether through an engineering background or self-taught
- You should enjoy being hands on with electronics
- Must be a compulsive note-taker, intellectually curious and very organized
- Must be able to communicate via email and phone in a clear and direct manner
- CAD / 3D modeling skills a big plus
Organovo has announced that they have successfully printed samples of liver cells that are partially behaving like actual liver cells. Via CBCNews:
The company’s researchers used a gel to build three types of liver cells and arranged them into the same kind of three-dimensional cell architecture found in a human liver. Although not fully functional, the 3D cells were able to produce some of the same proteins as an actual liver does and interacted with each other and with compounds introduced into the tissue as they would in the body.
That means biomedical researchers could potentially use the tissue to test drugs or investigate the effect of certain diseases.
Organovo’s researchers are not the first to apply 3D printing to biomedicine. Doctors at the University of Michigan last year used a 3D printer to build a synthetic trachea for a child with a birth defect that had collapsed her airway, and as scientists and engineers get more familiar with the technology its uses will no doubt grow.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that human genes cannot be patented, a decision that could shape the future of medical and genetic research and have profound effects on pharmaceuticals and agriculture.
On the other hand, Thomas wrote, Myriad’s creation of a synthetic form of DNA — called cDNA — based on its discovery does deserve patent protection.
NEW PRODUCT – My Little Geek by Andrew & Sarah Spear. Imagine the joy of hearing your young one chatting away about holographic ninja or time-traveling joysticks. From Android to Zombie, this educational book will entertain children and parents alike. Suitable for children & l33t hackers 0-5+
Printable catalog (PDF)
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