Prototype Bus Pirate probe cables with heat shrink labels arrived today. We sent professionally printed heat shrink tubes to the cable people (white) and they attached them to 100 cables. We printed our own shrink labels on the L-Mark LK320P and attached them to 100 cables in-house (yellow). Results and cable giveaway below!
Author Archives: Ian
Making a Dangerous Prototypes sign in Shenzhen
Shenzhen isn’t just about building electronic hardware, so many things can be created and customized inexpensively. One day we spotted an entire street of shops selling customized signs in Dongmen, the old market neighborhood. There’s a few dozen shops with hundreds of sample signs in different styles hung on the walls, most decorated with binky […]
Killing cformsII contact form SPAM with regex
It used to be a trickle of two or three a day, but lately we’ve been hammered with hundreds of automated SPAM submissions through the cformsII contact form plugin we use with WordPress. The contact form feeds into a Google Groups mailing list that forwards to the whole team. 99% of the SPAM advertised a […]
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Crafts
Makers express their inner geek in all mediums. This collection of crochet sea creatures is amazing, beautiful, and delightfully creepy at the same time. More fun stuff below the fold.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Hands on activities
Maker Faire isn’t just a place to see cool projects, you get to try things out yourself. At this pan flute workshop straws, cardboard, and rubber bands are combined into a simple DIY musical instrument.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Cool stuff
Tokyo’s extensive metro and train system recreated in colored water and air bubbles by Takatsugu Kuriyama. The colors are the same used on the system map. Tubes rise above and dip below a clear sheet representing above and below ground trains. More cool stuff below the break.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Music and instruments
Z-Machines, a robot rock band, headlined the Maker Faire with several concerts each day. These weren’t the only rock stars though, head below the fold to see more noise makers from Japan.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Robots
Walking, flying, or rolling, Maker Faire is overrun by bots of all types. A-L-C is an animatronic troll with amazing realistic facial movements.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Gadgets and electronics
Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone, whatever – we love the gadgets and electronics designs on display at Maker Faire. @Nasupl_r’s Twitter Mention/Favorite Notify Helmet flashes to life when she’s mentioned on Twitter. An mBed board monitors her Twitter feed, while a Bluetooth connection makes it completely wireless.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Toys
Maker Faire has toys for kids of all ages. Ball maze is updated with a bluetooth interface to a tablet computer. The maze angle matches the tablet, tip the tablet to guide a ball through the maze to the hole in the center.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Flying machines
Remote control flying machines with delicate tissue wings and tiny motors are unique to Tokyo Mini Maker Faire. They flap, soar, and glide overhead in the main exhibition hall. See more at Flapping wing and Microslowfly.
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: Weird and wonderful
Many things at Maker Faire don’t fit into neat categories. Here’s some of the weird and wonderful projects that delight and entertain. Walking around with your pants unzipped? Muro Lab’s zipper meter can help. When you’re fly is down the red LED lights at the bottom. When you’re zipped, the meter shows green for ‘good […]
Tokyo Maker Faire 2013: 3D printers
3D printers have come to dominate Maker Faires around the world, but Tokyo has some unique and creative designs we’ve not seen anywhere else. Rostock mini is a solder paste “printer” with pick and place functions. It applies solder paste to circuit boards instead of printing with melted plastic, and also places electronic components on […]
Tokyo Mini Maker Faire 2013
When Maker Faire arrives in the biggest city in the world, you know the projects will be amazing. Japan’s makers, artists, designers, geeks, and hackers showed amazing projects of every type imaginable in Tokyo this past weekend. Japan’s Maker Faire continues to grow, and this year was the biggest yet. Follow our coming posts to […]
Shaizi (liars’ dice), street BBQ, and beer: guanxi the easy way
Guanxi means “face”, which is basically a Chinese system of respect in business and life. If a friend does you a favor, you owe them one back. If you do good business with a vendor, they treat you well. Westerners, especially, I think blow this way out of proportion. Maybe in the past it was […]
Making wine in Shenzhen: four months into a three week tour
Where we’ve been Dangerous Prototypes has been around four years this summer. This internet gig started at the DIY Life and Hack a Day blogs when I was a poor student roughing it in Amsterdam. A couple hundred bucks for a feature piece bought a lot of ramen stampot, and paid for an otherwise unsustainable […]
Taco Crawl 2013 Thursday before Maker Faire
Every year before Maker Faire we spend a day in San Francisco to visit the Noisebridge hackerspace, Instructables, and other open hardware/DIY/hacker friendly people. Noisebridge is located in a neighborhood called the Mission District, and it has dozens of delicious Mexican taco shops called taquerias. We try to eat a carne asada taco at every […]
mbed’s BSD B.S.?
A couple days ago mbed, the ARM platform with a silly online compiler, announced that it’s register abstraction layer would be released under an open source BSD license. Readers raised the point that this is only partly true. We hate it when open source is used as a publicity ploy with only partial code releases, […]
Soup dumplings in Dongmen market Shenzhen
If I come back from China 10 kilos heavier this is the man to blame. Some of the best soup dumplings ever. Proper procedure is to bite the top and drink the soup inside. Then eat the pastry and meat filling. Failure to drink the soup results in seriously sticky fingers. 5 dumplings for 10rmb […]
Massive spam attack in progress
We’re getting 10 to 20 spam comments a minute. I locked down links in comments. Sorry for any spammy comment notifications going out. No idea why a kismet isn’t working. Could be a hack. Will reinstall WordPress shortly.