Our friend RobotGrrl, who hosts the weekly Robot Party, is running an Indiegogo fundraiser for RoboBrrd, her charming robot kit project. We’ve enjoyed watching the development of this project (sometimes up close!) and we’re excited to see it take flight. To get your own RoboBrrd or just support the project, contribute now!
Eric over at Low Voltage Labs has posted up his design for a simple PCB ideal for putting an LED into a pumpkin. This is very much like our simple LED pumpkin project but in a neat, reusable format. And it makes a mighty cute little jack-o-lantern all on its own.
He has made it available as a kit with PCB, switch, resistor, battery holder and the same candle flicker LEDs which we love so much. Unfortunately, the kit is currently sold out. Hopefully he’ll make more, if not in time for this Halloween, then at least for next year.
For Lady Ada Lovelace Day, we would like to celebrate an area of success for women in science and technology: the open source hardware community. This vibrant community has many strong women it holds up as role models. The newly formed Open Source Hardware Association is well represented with board members Alicia Gibb (president), Danese Cooper, Catarina Mota, and Wendy Seltzer. In addition, the Open Hardware Summit has been organized by women from the start: Alicia Gibb and Ayah Bdeir in 2010 and 2011, followed by Catarina Mota and Dustyn Roberts this year.
The 2012 lineup of speakers included women from all over the world and from an amazing variety of disciplines, including Leah Buechley, Ayah Bdeir, Shannon Doesmagen and Liz Barry, Katherine Moriwaki, Louisa Campbell, Liza Stark, Sylvia Todd, Erin Kennedy, Myriam Ayass, Amanda Wozniak, Meg Pirrung, Valérie Lamontagne, and Hannah Perner-Wilson.
In addition to the speakers, there were even more women presenting posters and demos, including Amelia Marzec, Cindy Harnett, Gabrialla Levine, Jennifer Jacobs, Joanna Cheung, Tesia Kosmalski, Analisa Russo and Jennifer Lewis, Margarita Benitez, Maki Komuro, and Sophi Kravitz.
All of these presenters build on the past two years of excellent content at the summit, and we look forward to the inspiring speakers of years to come.
Photo of OSHWA board members Windell Oskay, Nathan Seidle, Wendy Seltzer, Alicia Gibb and Catarina Mota at the 2012 Open Hardware Summit by Jacob Gibb.
Logan wrote in to let us know how he is using our Art Controllers for his aquaponics project:
The system has two 140 gallon fish tanks and three 4×8 grow beds filled with grow stones. The beds water flow control is metered with Arduinos with data from Adafruit flow sensors on each bed. The important part is the bed water control, that is controlled by Art Controllers. We have almost 100 fat Talipia fish to fertilize the plants. The room is red because of all the high power LED grow lights.
The grow beds fill until a float switch trips the Art Controller that then opens a big 24 V solenoid valve draining the grow beds to a sump that pumps the cleaned water back to the fish tanks. The controller lets me program how long the beds stay drained so the plant roots get some O2 and not rot.
Thanks for sharing your project and pictures, Logan!
Over at rasterweb, Pete has been playing with StippleGen2 to create artwork with the laser engraver at the Milwaukee Makerspace.
StippleGen’s output consists of lots of tiny overlapping circles and this piece was made by using vector engraving, where the laser traces out each circle individually. In some places, the lasered marks overlap many times, leading to a new and unusual surface texture. In the closeup above you can see the ridges and valleys formed by the overlapped engraved areas. Go check out his article for the rest of the story about the project!
This is one of the coolest things that you can actually buy. It is a Klein Bottle Opener by Bathsheba Grossman. It is made in the shape of a Klein Bottle, a 3D representation of a single sided shape. And it opens bottles. It’s a 3D printed stainless steel sculpture that fits nicely in the hand, giving you just the right kind of leverage; an absolute pleasure to use.
But— and this is where we were caught off guard— there’s a second great, yet completely independent, kind of Klein bottle opener out there: the Beverage Tool by Klein Tools. Klein tools is quite truly (as they say), “the #1 choice among professional tradesmen.”
We happened upon this gem at Hand-Eye Supply, the Core77 store, while visiting Portland, Oregon. As far as we can tell, it was there because they like well-made tools, including those from Klein, not because they like mathematics.
The tool has convenient “Tip-Ident” mark in the shape of a bottle cap so you can quickly find it among other tools.
And now, dear reader, you know where to get a complete set of Klein bottle openers.
After reading our post on Improving open source hardware: Visual diffs, Wil wrote in to to tell us about Cube Hero:
I have a demo up of visual diffs for 3D printable models. Here you can see a specific model, and … you can see diffs as I changed the model.
We’re excited to see new tools for collaboration like this being developed. Besides visual diffs, the project aims to provide visual versioning, 3D object sharing, and bill of materials integration. Cube Hero is looking for interested possible users, so go check it out–they’re accepting signups for updates and launch invitations.
Our friend Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries is a finalist in Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur of 2012 contest. Head on over and vote! (Yes, we’re sorry–facebook login required.)
Update: As our commenters have pointed out, now you can also vote by texting 170116 to 22333!
Congratulations to the recipients of the Open Source Awards announced today at OSCON: Bradley Kuhn, Elizabeth Krumbach, Massimo Banzi, Christie Koehler, and Jim Jagielski!
We were honored to participate in the creation of the awards which were given out this year. Using an Eggbot, we plotted the Open Source Award design onto lightbulbs which were integrated into the awards which were given out on stage. Additionally, the award recipients are each receiving an Eggbot. It is exciting and fitting that this year’s award is itself open source hardware which works on open source software and was created using open source tools.
Top photo by Sarah Novotny.
Adrian Secord, who wrote the stippling algorithm used in our own StippleGen program, has now published a brand new iPhone app, SnapDot, that can instantly turn your pictures into stipple drawings, including colored stipple drawings. That is pretty neat indeed.
