Maker Faire 2011 epilogue

Seeed took a group photo with everyone at the booth but I don’t have a copy yet. This is only part of the group: front (L to R) Eric (Seeed Studio founder), Jack (Gadget Factory, Logic Sniffer co-designer), Ian (me); back (L to R) Fan (Seeed store manager), Tully (Seeed project engineer) and Steve (Seeed RnD director).

Maker Faire was an incredible experience, thank you to Seeed Studio for sponsoring Maker Faire and making this all possible. Eric, Liao, Fan, Steve, and Tully came all the way from China to setup the booth, great work guys! Thank you to my fellow exhibitors who won the Seeed Studio booth an Editor’s Choice ribbon. Jack with a Papilio arcade demo, Al with the Magic Mirror, James with a Gameduino demo, Xu Cheng with a hacked marble run. These were all great interactive demos that got a ton of attention.

Thank you Derek, Gnewt, Noah, Eric, Michael, Rich, JBeal, and all the readers who stopped by or followed the event on the blog. Thank you to all the project owners who said hi, like Charley Jones at SMTBoards who used his Bus Pirate to debug a project at the Faire. I will write everyone who left a card, I’m also available via the contact form.

I met a bunch of people I’ve known for years, but have never seen face to face. Eric, Fan, and Liao, who handle our projects at Seeed. Jack, co-designer of the Logic Sniffer. Eric, Christy, and Laura from Instructables, one of the first places I posted a project. Stephan from Watterott Electronic, a Bus Pirate and Logic Sniffer distributor in Germany, and lucky Airbus A380 flyer. Nate from SparkFun, who also carries the Bus Pirate and the Logic Sniffer. Joe Garrison, designer of the Saleae Logic talked about the new 16bit hardware (hint, it does have a FPGA after all). Eric from Low Voltage Labs provided a few VideoOverlayShield PCBs to give away later this week.

Thanks to Sjaak, Jawi, rsdio, Jamz, sqkybeaver, Dukey, and everyone else who helped out in the forum. Thank you to the machinegeek and Lynn for keeping the blog running, and Skyler for photographing the event.

Several take-home points stand out. There’s lots of interest in DP’s relationship with Seeed, and how you can get your own ideas and projects turned into real-life hardware. Tutorials were already underway and will be up soon. Also, I’m going to more conventions, starting with CCC this summer in Berlin, and maybe Maker Faire in New York.  I’m a shy geeky guy, but I need to take a more active role as the face of Dangerous Prototypes. Also look for a weekly video of new projects in the lab.

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Back at the workshop

We’re back from Maker Faire. Most forum posts have been answered, still a few to go. Email should be cleared by the end of the day. Free PCB codes and free PCBs will go out soon. Normal support and posting will resume shortly. Thanks for your patience.

Here’s some stuff we want to address ASAP:

  • IR Toy REC&Play application and long transmit bugs
  • Bus Pirate firmware v6 with bug fixes
  • Open Source USB stack with Bus Pirate v4
  • USB POV Toy firmware

Openenergymonitor


emonTx stands for Energy Monitoring Transmitter. It’s a small, open source wireless energy monitoring node. It’s based on the Arduino (Atmega328) and is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE and programmed via an FTDI to USB cable.

It’s designed to take inputs from multiple CT sensors, optically from a pulse-output utility meter and from multiple one-wire temperature sensors, and interface via RF with the Nanode which then makes the data available over the Internet. The emonTx is designed to be powered by 2x AA batteries or 5V USB.

Via OpenEnergyMonitor.

Android ADK with a standard Arduino Uno and USB host shield

Rather than wait for the pricey Google ADK hardware, Mario Bohmer decided to hack away at Android accessory development on his own. Since the Google firmware was based on their dev board, he had to port the firmware and software for use with the Arduino Uno and a USB Host Shield. He reports success using the procedure explained in detail on his website.

Most significantly, he didn’t use Google’s USB_HOST_SHIELD library opting instead for a patched version, as well as a stripped down version of demokit.pde. All the necessary software is available through Mario’s website.

Thanks Mario! Via the contact form.

Free PCB coupon to RT #3 & #14 @dangerousproto

Every Tuesday we give away some extra PCBs via Twitter. This post was announced on twitter. The 3rd and 14th person who retweet it get free PCBs. We changed the approach this week due to auto-retweeters grabbing boards first. Thanks for the heads-up on auto-retweeters JT! Love it, hate it? Let us know in the comments below

This week we’re giving away two PCB codes. Pick your own PCB from the free PCB drawer.

We just got back from the Maker Faire. Shame on British Airways, and kudos to KLM for stepping in and getting us home. We’ll have a final wrap up post tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, it was great to meet you all. We’ll do a lot more CONs and Faires in the future.

A big backlog of PCBs and PCB codes will go out today and tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:

  • Free PCB Sunday. The classic. Every week, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs while you wait for the weekend

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SoundAffects turns sounds of city into music

SoundAffects is a project designed to turn streets sounds into music. It uses an Arduino to read data from street level sensors measuring temperature, light, color, weather, cell phone activity, noise and proximity. This data is then processed using a combination of Jitter, MaxMSP and Ableton Live to produce dynamic musical compositions which passersby can then listen to via wall mounted headphone jacks. Visualizations are separately produced using HTML5 and Javascript and produced on a wall mounted LCD screen.

SoundAffects is a NYC based composition created through collaboration between Mono, Parsons the New School for Design, Tellart and PD Solid.

You can listen to and view the results of this project via a timeline on the SoundAffects website.

We’d like to see the source code and schematic for this project!

Via Creative Applications Network.

CPLD Commodore C64 memory project

The website 64HDD has plenty of information about mods and upgrades for Commodore C64 enthusiasts. They have an article explaining their exploration of using CPLDs in C64 hardware mods. Their first CPLD project, explained in the article, explores the build of a 256kB memory expansion board originally designed using TTL chips. The project uses the since discontinued 64-macrocell XCR3064 CPLD by Xilinx, largely because at the time he wrote the article the PLCC package was the easiest to work with. (Of course, you could use our CPLD Development Board for a project such as this!)

Whether you’re a C64 hobbyist or a cutting edge developer, you can get your own CPLD development board for $15 including worldwide shipping from Seeedstudio.

US DoD gives thumbs up to open source

In a boost to the open source software movement, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) issued a 68+ page report entitled Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software, the DoD outlines the military’s experiences with and approval of open source software. From this paragraph on page 1 of the Introduction, it appears that the DoD writers actually get it:

Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code. This is optimal only for the monopoly contractor, but creates inefficiencies and ineffectiveness for the government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds.

The report outlines a framework with recommendations to assist government agencies in planning and utilizing OTD resources. One piece of sagacious advice found on report page 4 reads: “In general, it is important to simplify use, modification, and distribution. If it takes a team of lawyers to determine if there are adequate rights to modify a program, it will not happen.”

Good stuff.

Redo: Maker Faire Day 2: Exhibits and booths

Opps, it looks like we added the wrong photoset for the day 2 post.  Here’s a second try.

Here are some of the most popular and/or memorable booths and exhibits of the day, featuring some LED fashion, a Foodies Corner, and some of the most well-known participants.

More photos below the fold.

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Maker Faire Day 2: Hackerspaces

A lot of prominent hackerspaces were represented at this year’s Maker’s Faire, including Noisebridge from San Francisco and CrashSpace from LA. Day 2 also included an inspirational panel discussion on the importance and future of hackerspaces, featuring Jimmy Rogers of Artisan’s Asylum (Boston), Jordan Bunker of Pumping Station 1 (Chicago), and Mitch Altman of Noisebridge, among others.

More photos below the fold.

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Maker Faire Day 1: Booths, Panels and Exhibits

The first day of Maker Faire had some great exhibits that really embodied the educational and creative spirit of the event. And some were just plain fun. Here are some of the highlights, including the Coke Zero & Mentos fountain, the Life Size Mousetrap, a cooperative Pac Man game, a MacGuyver class, and a really interesting panel on sourcing electronics featuring Eric from Seeed and Nate from Sparkfun.

More photos below the fold.

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