The entire Pearl River Delta area of China is a manufacturing powerhouse. Huaqiangbei, the famous giant electronics market, is just a tiny facet of a huge industrial ecosystem. About 30 minutes north of Shenzhen there’s a giant market the size of a town that supplies not just electronics, but chemicals, materials, tools, machines, and, of […]
Category Archives: #liveupdates
Random spottings on factory tour
Joined a friend on a factory audit today totally unrelated to anything electronic. Spotted a few cool thongs though. This is a metal polishing station with a red bull can full of polish. Down the hall is an unrelated factory making plastic tubing for bag machines. ABS plastic pellets go in the hopper and tube […]
Taxi death on way to Shenzhen factory visit
Took a taxi about an hour to the manufacturing area of Shenzhen, Bao’on. When we got in it seemed like there was something wrong with the car or driver, 3rd and 4th gears seemed nonexistent. Initially I though maybe we should swap cabs, its a long trip after all. But that seemed just too paranoid. […]
Chinese New Year in Shenzhen the world electronics capital
Shenzhen wasn’t a town 30 years ago, it was barely a village. Almost nobody is from Shenzhen, people come here to make money and send it to family in other parts of China. Over the Chinese New Year, that two week period when you can’t order from Seeed Studio, tons of eBay vendors, and all […]
Bus Pirate probe cable prototypes and giveaway
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!
Another day, another project, another fixup..
We designed a microcontroller board for a power supply, but somehow we forgot to add the oscillator to the circuit. We thought it was enough to add two nets called ‘OSC1’ and ‘OSC2’ to the schematic… Why can’t Eagle cope with that automatically?! The lovely photo was taken with an A5000, an Android-based clone of […]
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 […]
OOMP part box
We had 1000 boxes and part holding trays made up for the new OOMP part management system. These won’t be at Seeed yet, just for our internal use and giveaways, but I wanted to share the result. Each set (box+tray) is about 1.2RMB ($0.20), took about a week to make and deliver. We asked for […]
GNU Radio demo: ultrasound data transmission via a laptop
Here the open source GNU Radio companion program is used to demonstrate the transmission of data from one laptop to another using frequency shift keying (FSK). They use an audio carrier frequency of 23 kHz. You can download the code for the GNU Radio companion flowgraph at Anfractuosity.com.
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 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 […]
Free download: SSTV Handbook
Drone found this while perusing the Southgate ARC site: Here is the 176 page E-book “Image Communication on Short Waves, ham radio handbook for SSTV, WEFAX and digital SSTV”, by Martin Bruchanov, OK2MNM. The book is offered as a free .pdf download. But a contribution is requested, and is well deserved. The book is a […]