This weekend, Oct. 4-5, is CalGames 2013, an off-season FRC competition. It’s being hosted by the team we mentor, Firebird Robotics, at Fremont High School here in Sunnyvale, California. The event is open to the public and free of charge for spectators. Matches are scheduled for 6:15-7:15 Friday night, start again at 8:15 on Saturday morning and everything wraps up with awards at 5:15 on Saturday afternoon.
If you’re in the area, come watch the robots shoot frisbees and climb the pyramids!
Refined by artist Eric Hagan is described as
a food safe sugar based electromechanical kinetic sculpture. Utilizing digital fabrication and mold making techniques, Refined represents a few select stages from the manufacturing process for refining sugar.
At Maker Faire New York, Eric brought along not only the mechanisms, but also the molds he used to make the gears and other components out of sugar.
Matt Mets of Blinkinlabs assembled a crack team of volunteers to assemble BlinkyTape for the Crystal Archway at Maker Faire NY. They sat in the dark with their soldering irons and LEDs, making Maker Faire happen in real time.
It was great to see the installation come together over the course of the fair.
After building up one of our Three Fives kits, Ed wrote in to say:
I have been an electronics hobby enthusiast for well over 45 years building many, many kits, hacking my own stuff, others’ stuff, designing projects, etc. I have to say, your Three-Fives kit is truly the nicest commercially available kit I have ever had the privilege of assembling.
I was inspired to create a small, flexible wire harness with an 8-pin header on the end to effectively create an “In-Circuit Emulator” interface. You can prototype a circuit and then quickly pull the chip and insert the “ICE probe” and use a scope to probe any part of the chip you want to see what’s going on “under the hood.”
Thanks to Ed for sharing his project with us— and what a cool idea!
Eric Weddington of Atmel shows off a wafer full of ATmega328P chips (as found in Arduino and many of our own kits) at Maker Faire New York.
That’s about 1500 chips on an eight inch wafer, and not something you see every day!
NeoLucida was the subject of one of the best presentations and demos at the 2013 Open Hardware Summit.
The NeoLucida is a drawing aid that allows you to trace what you see. It’s the first portable, authentic camera lucida to be manufactured in nearly a century. We love camera lucidas, and we think they can help people understand art history in provocative new ways.
The NeoLucida is was launched in a wildly successful kickstarter campaign to make a modern version of a camera lucida available to a new generation of artists. It’s not a complicated device, but it is an extremely specialized one, and niche products like it are a place where open source hardware and crowdfunding can come together incredibly successfully. They were able to bring the cost of owning a camera lucida into the realm of possibility for artists who can’t afford antiques. By publishing how the device works and how they make it, they have increased understanding both of the device itself and of historical works of art made using it.
It was exciting to try out a NeoLucida during the demo session at the summit, especially after hearing about its history.
This week is Maker Week in New York, and on Friday, September 20, Windell will be moderating the Atmel Analyst Panel: The Maker Community and Education. Panelists will include Massimo Banzi of Arduino, Quinn of QTechKnow, Reza Kazerounian, Bob Martin and Sylvie Barak of Atmel, Brian Jepson of Make Books and AnnMarie Thomas of the University of St. Thomas. The event will be at the Hilton Manhattan East at 11:00 am, and walk-ins are welcome. You can contact pr@atmel.com for more information about attending.
Maker Faire New York is almost here! We’ll be in the Atmel booth, showing a few of our favorite AVR projects, including Meggy Jr RGB, Art Controller, and Octolively.
We’ll also be bringing our new Three Fives timer (despite it not having any microcontrollers). The schedule for the fair is up, so if you’re in the area, you can start planning your weekend now.
DropBot is an open source Digital Microfluidic (DMF) automation system that was presented at the 2013 Open Hardware Summit by Ryan Fobel of Wheeler Microfluidics Laboratory at the University of Toronto.
In DMF, discrete fluidic droplets are manipulated on the surface of an array of electrodes coated with a hydrophobic insulator.
It extremely exciting to see the sciences embracing open hardware in new ways.
Our friends at Hacker Scouts have just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their move into a new, dedicated space in Oakland.
If funded your support will give our families access to equipment such as 3D printers and laser cutters and fund low cost classes in everything from robotics to woodworking to programming, and together we will fulfill a larger mission of providing a new kind of education to as many kids as we can.
We’ve backed the project, and we’re also honored that they have invited us to participate in one of their pledge rewards, a VIP Maker Dinner with the Hacker Scouts founders and other prominent makers in the Bay Area.
Head over to their campaign to learn more about the materials, tools and site upgrades they’re fundraising for and how they’ll be benefitting the local community as well as the larger maker community.
