BarBot, the premier cocktail robotics event, is this weekend, October 25-26 at the Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (ages 21+ only).
We’ll be bringing Drink Making Unit 2.1, with its new vodka switch and peristaltic pump.
Tennis for Two build in Germany
Peter wrote in to share his build based on our Tennis for Two video game project.
He has more pictures up in his post.
Lady Ada Lovelace Day 2013
For Lady Ada Lovelace Day, we are once again celebrating women in open source hardware. Pictured above are three key women from the 2013 Open Hardware Summit: Catarina Mota, from the Open Source Business panel and OSHWA board member; Addie Wagenknecht, Open Hardware Summit co-Chair; and Alicia Gibb, conference organizer and OSHWA president.
A number of women also presented talks during the summit:
- Alice King, Open Source Funding
- Amanda Wozniak, Collective Innovation Enjoy The Mess
- Phoenix Perry, Embodied play design and building a female developer community
- Sophi Kravitz, Open source Products, Can you Profit?
- Becky Stern, Wearables at the intersection of electronics and craft
- Katherine Scott, SolidStatity Forever: Surviving as a Human in a Robotic World
- Mathilde Berchon, The State of Open Hardware Entrepreneurship in 2013
In addition, the following women presented posters or demos:
Toni Klopfenstein, Erin “RobotGrrl” Kennedy, Gabriella Levine, Analisa Russo, Amelia Marzec, Anuja Apte, Nadya Peek, Tania Morimoto, Ayah Bdeir, Linda Karina Duran Bautista, Aisen Caro Chacin, Pilar Zaragoza, Alexandra Shuey, Christalee Bieber.
All of these presenters build on a history of excellent content within this vibrant community.
Photo courtesy of the Open Hardware Summit (CC-BY).
Snap-O-Lantern Kit
Just in time for Halloween, we’re launching a Snap-O-Lantern kit. You can still build this robotic snapping pumpkin from scratch using our original instructions, or you can do it the easy way with this kit, which uses one of our ATtiny2313 target boards and has all the parts you’ll need— except the mini-pumpkin and three AA batteries.
We’re putting the full documentation for the kit on our wiki.
Maker Camp: Halloween Edition
Pumpkins are being featured today on a special Halloween edition of Maker Camp, and I’ll be there, showing our Snap-O-Lantern project. Tune in at 5 pm (Pacific), today, Thursday, October 10.
Maniacal Labs on the Three Fives Kit
Dan at Maniacal Labs posted a review of our Three Fives kit:
… yay for creative kits that cause you to go out and (re)learn stuff! The cool thing about the 555 chip is that it is very much a building block to bigger things. There are plenty of resources out there for 555 applications and project ideas. I’d like to thank Eric Schlaepfer for his awesome kit idea and Evil Mad Scientist for helping make it available to the masses!
LED Vertical Blinds
dinofizz posted in the forums about the LED display based on the Peggy 2 he installed on his vertical blinds:
I had custom PCBs made to help daisy chain the vertical blinds (they’re sitting on top of the horizontal beam from which the blinds hang). 300 ft spool of 16-way ribbon cable completely used up. Around ~4000 individual solder joints, and I’m still using breadboard to hold things together at the moment! Took me forever.
He linked to a few more build photos over in the forum post, and he even posted some video of it in action:
Video Sans-Video Game
One of the treats at Maker Faire New York was watching kids playing Michael Newman‘s mechanical Video Sans-Video Game. The play field is a scroll of paper with drawn-on caves and channels through which you must navigate (via joy-stick) your little paper space craft on an X-Y stage. If your craft collides with a wall or an asteroid, an infrared detector sees the darkened part of the paper, and it is game over!
Michael brought two versions— a large arcade style one with a belt driven stage, and a smaller one modeled after the WaterColorBot cord and windlass system.
One interesting thing about the young kids playing the game is that none of them had ever seen a media system that required rewinding to restart. Michael drew a new game Sunday morning to replace the slightly tattered roll after a full day of play at Maker Faire on Saturday.
Welcome, Science Friday Listeners!
We’d like to welcome listeners to today’s Science Friday show. We’re a small company that blogs about cool DIY projects and sells hobby electronic kits. You can find our archive of Halloween projects here, and our store is here.
Update: the Larson Scanner kit mentioned on the show is here, and the Snap-O-Lantern kit is here.
Halloween Hacks on Science Friday
This week on the NPR radio show Science Friday, our co-founder, Windell Oskay, will be talking with Ira Flatow about Halloween hacks and projects and will likely be taking calls from listeners. Find out how to listen online and what radio stations will be broadcasting in your area. The show airs live from 2-4 p.m. Eastern Time (11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific) and Windell should be on around 3:30 p.m. Eastern (12:30 p.m. Pacific).
Our archive of Halloween projects and hacks can be found here.
Update: Here’s the audio from the segment:
