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!
Here is what we heard, over and over last night:
“Whoa, is that a real— Holy crap, those are real pumpkins!”
Yep.
Not as easy as we thought it would be, either. Nor as light. But here’s how to do it.
Continue reading Halloween Costumes: Mr. and/or Mrs. Pumpkinhead
Today we’re releasing a major update to Alpha Clock Five, our alphanumeric LED desk clock, alarm clock, and data display device.
Alpha Clock Five still has five remarkably bright, remarkably huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays. But for version 2.0, we’ve rewritten the firmware from scratch. It’s packed with new features and it is simply a joy to use.
To name a few of those new features, Alpha Clock Five now:
And, here is one more thing that we’ve been cooking up for a long long time:
The all-new White Edition of Alpha Clock Five— with five 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays, now in stunning white. (And, shown above with a phone for scale.)
Alpha Clock Five firmware v. 2.0 is now shipping on new Alpha Clock Five kits, and is also available as a download and free update for anyone who already has an Alpha Clock Five with the original firmware. Please see our documentation wiki for details.
Read on for more about what’s new in Alpha Clock Five v. 2.0, and about the design of the White Edition.
Continue reading Alpha Clock Five v2.0 and Alpha Clock White
Halloween, one of our favorite holidays, is fast approaching. We’ve updated our Halloween Projects Archive once again to ensure that all of our Halloween projects are gathered together in one convenient location. If one of our projects inspires you to make something, we’d love to see the results in the flickr auxiliary.
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.
Just announced on the OSHWA site, the OSI and OSHWA have signed a co-existence agreement around the use of the community generated open source hardware logo. From the announcement:
This agreement means that each group separately has control of their respective logo and in particular that the Open Source Hardware community will be able to continue to use the Open Source Hardware logo.
We’re very happy that the open source communities were able to work together on this issue.
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.
This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, October 20-21, 2-7 pm is ComBots Cup VII at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. ComBots is the heavyweight championship for combat robotics and is one of the loudest, most entertaining robotics competitions there is.
Teams from all over the US, Canada and Brazil will be coming to California to fight for The ComBots Cup – the annual international robot combat championship now in its seventh year. The ComBots Cup is to fighting robots what the World Series is to baseball. The two-day event features robots weighing up to 220 pounds fighting to be crowned the world heavyweight champion.
To get a taste of it, check out the video above, which is one in a series from earlier events. You can get your tickets online now. We’ll hope to see you there!
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!
Maker Faire has grown to an overwhelming event, where it just isn’t possible to experience everything, but we’ve pulled together a few highlights of the 2012 “World” Maker Faire in New York.
Maker Faire started out on Friday night with a Mayoral Proclamation declaring Maker Week in New York. Mayor Bloomberg’s words— about his own tinkering background —were surprisingly personal and resounded with many of us.
Shortly after the reading of the proclamation, Jeri Ellsworth was crowned Maker Hero at the Makey Awards while decked out in LEDs from eyelashes to skirt hem. Congratulations, Jeri!
Once Maker Faire got into full swing, we only were able to catch a few heats of Nerdy Derby, but it was a huge hit.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Alden Hart about TinyG and grblShield, two motor controller boards designed for low-cost CNC machines.
DIWire is an open source CNC wire bender from Pensa.
Another CNC project we were excited to see in person was Pancake Bot, a pancake batter dispenser made from Lego.
While the sheer number of 3D printers was somewhat overwhelming, a couple of newcomers stood out from the crowd: the B9Creator and the Form 1, both resin-based printers.
The Touched installation by artist Rebecca Strauss would quickly retract when touched, and then gradually relax again.
It was made with conductive felt sensors mounted over wooden armatures.
The flipbookit mechanical animation kit is on kickstarter right now. It looks much better in person than on the internet.
These tiny OLED oscilloscopes by Gabotronics made us go “squee”!
Our good friend Jenine Bressner created rich textures from laser cut fabric.
And forming a bridge with the makers of the past, there was a beautiful collection of patent models from The Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum.
Photo of Jeri Ellsworth by Becky Stern.
