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.
BarBot 2013 has just been announced: the event will be at the Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco on October 25-26 and tickets are on sale. Registration for robots is also open— there’s still time to get your cocktail robot ready!
At the recent Boing Boing Ingenuity Conference in San Francisco, Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, Tech Ninja teamed up with Joe Grand and Ben Krasnow to use the data stream generated by driving a car to create input for the WaterColorBot. Largest. Brush. Ever.
Over at Boing Boing you can read more about their hack, which took grand prize for the hack day.
Kilobots are small, low-cost, open source vibrobots designed by the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard to study swarming behaviors. A group of these bristlebot-inspired robots were demonstrated at the Open Hardware Summit.
Photo by Michael Rubenstein.
This Friday, September 6, we’ll be at the 2013 Open Hardware Summit at MIT. The schedule looks great, and the event is now sold out. Those of you lucky enough to get tickets will love this years e-badge by WyoLum, featuring a programmable e-paper display.
This past week we introduced our “Three Fives” discrete 555 timer kit, which comes with a set of “legs” to make it look like a (DIP packaged) integrated circuit. In that introduction, we mentioned that the legs are machined and formed from PVC foam. But what exactly does that mean? Here (in gory step by step detail) is how we make them!
We’re pleased to announce our newest kit, the “Three Fives” Kit, a kit to build your own 555 timer circuit out of discrete components. Here’s a way to re-create one of the most classic, popular, and all-around useful chips of all time.
The kit is a faithful and functional transistor-scale replica of the classic NE555 timer integrated circuit, one of the most classic, popular, and all-around useful chips of all time. The kit was designed and developed as a collaboration with Eric Schlaepfer, based on a previous version (pictured here), and adapted from the equivalent schematic in the original datasheets for the device. There have been a few other examples of circuits like these (such as the one that we featured in our article about the 555 contest), but we really like how this one has come together.
The kit is designed to resemble an (overgrown) integrated circuit, based around an extra-thick matte-finish printed circuit board. The stand— which gives the circuit board eight legs in the shape of DIP-packaged integrated circuit pins —is made from machined and formed semi-rigid PVC foam.
To actually hook up to the giant 555, there are the usual solder connection points, but there are also thumbscrew terminal posts that you can use with bare wires, solder lugs, or alligator clips.
One of the really cool things about having a unintegrated disintegrated discrete circuit like this is that you can actually hook up probes and monitor what happens at different places inside the circuit.
So that’s our new “Three Fives” Kit (shown above with an original NE555 for scale). It’s not quite as big as our 555 footstool, nor as tasty as our edible version, but it’s a great little circuit, and it’s got legs.
Our friend John made Sconic Sections for a dinner party, with a slight variation: he baked the scone dough in ice cream cones. That led to a little bit of extra difficulty in slicing them, but the cone also provided an outline for the ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas.
