The Open Source Hardware Association works to help define what it means to be "Open Hardware", as well as foster a community, help creators navigate licensing models, and promote consistent terminology for Open Hardware projects. Their recent 2015 Open Hardware Summit was a resounding success. ThingM believes in OSHWA’s mission and we recently became supporting members. Thank you OSHWA for your work so far and continued success!
ThingM will once again be at Maker Faire Bay Area. It's the 10-year anniversary and we've been going since the very beginning (and have had a booth there for 8 years). This year it's on May 16 & 17 2015. Come join us! We'll be showing off projects made with our blink(1) USB RGB LED and our BlinkM Smart LED family of products. If you've done something neat with ThingM products, come tell us about it. See you there!
Tod was recently interviewed for the Embedded.fm podcast, episode #90 "Stick it in a Pumpkin". It was a lot of fun. We talked about blink(1), BlinkM, electronics production, Kickstarter, and a bunch of other things. You can listen to on iTunes or on the Embedded.fm website. And if you listen to the end, you'll hear a special 25% coupon code for blink(1)s. :-)
If you've not heard of Embedded.fm, and you're interested in electronics, you might like it. It's all about electronics. The host Elecia is awesome and wrote a pretty great book a few years ago called Making Embedded Systems.
Our little gadget-that-could, blink(1), has been seeing a lot of exposure and press. And we've been selling a bunch! Instead of having just a sub-page on our main website, we decided it was time that blink(1) got a website of its own. It has general info about what blink(1) is and why you want one, but also links to downloads, the start of a Getting Started section, an ever-growing FAQ, and a list of ways to contact us with questions or comments. It also gives us the needed space to build out more instructional material for blink(1), like How-Tos and Project Galleries.
Check it out: blink1.thingm.com
Once again ThingM will be at Maker Faire. We'll be in the Maker Shed, demoing our BlinkM family, as well as showing off what the new blink(1) mk2 can do. So. many. LEDs. And we'll be just one of many showing off LED projects. And for the first time outside of our Kickstarter, you'll be able to get your own blink(1) mk2! We have a limited quantity on hand for the Shed and they'll be stocking them for us. (Any backers reading this, yours are shipping now, but come visit us at the Faire if you want more)
Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 is May 17 & 18 at the San Mateo Event Center. It's mind-blowing and fun.
The Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (http://www.gaffta.org/) had a workshop for teachers of middle school students. They created a nice gender-neutral bracelet for sports fans using BlinkM MinMs (http://minm.thingm.com/)
As Grace says: "The workshop went well. I had two teachers as my students, one who teaches middle school and one who writes curriculum for a children's camp. They were both very interested in the MinMs and their potential to be used in teaching. One issue that came up was that one of the teachers was trying to come up with a gender neutral design and decided to make a 49ers wristband and wanted the LED to flash red, then yellow. However, we realized that there was no way to create a true yellow. We were able to get around it by covering the LED with yellow felt, as you can see from the video."
The theme for the Caltech Entrepreneurs Forum's November event was "The Internet of Things, Arduinos and the 'Maker Entrepreneur'".
Tod's talk "Intro to the Arduino Entrepreneurial System" touched on all these topics. The entire event was a blast, including a wonderful talk about commercial making with open source by Quinn of QtechKnow.
Slides with notes and MP3 audio of the entire event are below.
Download MP3 of the entire Forum proceedings, including Tod's talk.
Go grab the latest issue of Make Magazine! In addition to it having a wonderful run down of many of the different types of Arduino or Arduino-like boards out there, it also includes a project Mike & Tod created: CloudFridge. CloudFridge makes your fridge door Internet-connected, creating a real-time graph of when and how long the door is open. Applications of this data could range from a simple fridge energy monitor to diet planning. But mostly it's a demonstration of just how quickly one can go from idea to working implementation with tools such as Arduino, BlinkM, and Xively: we went from idea to working implementation in an afternoon.
We originally created this article over a year ago and its showing its age a bit (today the Arduino Yun would be a great alternative to what we used), but the techniques are still very valid. Thanks to the Make magazine staff for helping update the article in the light of the Pachube->Xively transition. And check out this awesome cute title graphic they made for the article.
On 16 October, Mike will be on an IOT Guru Panel with the CEO of Dragon Innovation, CEO of Bug Labs, and CEO of Libelium. They'll be discussing how they expect the IoT to evolve over the next few years and which vertical markets will see the greatest impact.
Also, back in July, Robert Scoble with his Google Glass interviewed Mike at PARC. Be sure to check out the video:
Mike gave a great talk at Augmented World Expo 2013. (as did ThingM advisor and good friend Ben Cerveny!) AWE brings together people to talk about the latest in augmented reality. Mike's talk was titled "Sculpting the Augmented World". Slides and notes are below.
He was also interviewed by AWE.tv and that's up on Youtube now.
Sculpting the Augmented World: Scale and Narrative in Augmented UX design by Mike Kuniavsky
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