Maker Faire 2014: We're going. Come visit. Get a blink(1)!

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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.

 

makerfaire2014-img1-450px

 

 

buildblink: nodejs build light using blink(1)

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Brett sent us a message with this cool Node.js add-on called "buildblink".  It's a continuous integration build light so you can tell when your code builds break. Different colour patterns can be configured. Default configuration follows the patterns below:

Patterns

  • Green Successful build
  • Flashing Green (temporarily) Newly successful build
  • Police Lights (temporarily) Newly failed build
  • Cycle Green / Yellow Building & previous build was green
  • Cycle Red / Yellow Building & previous build was red

Currently tested with one build, one light.

It currently works with TeamCity but he plans on adding support for Jenkins and Travis CI.

Check it out on npmjs.org.

 

Tod speaking at Caltech about Arduino, IoT, hackerspaces

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entforum-tod Every month the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, Tod's alma mater) hosts the Caltech Entrepreneurs Forum.   This month's topic is "The Internet of Things, Arduinos  and the 'Maker Entrepreneur'".

Tod will be there speaking about how Arduino, Hackerspaces, & Open Source can speed the development and creation of Internet of Things or other embedded intelligent devices.

The forum is Saturday, November 9, 2013.  Registration is open to all, $40 online or $50 at the door.

http://www.entforum.caltech.edu/

 

 

 

blink(1) mk2 Manufacturing Updates

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We been up to a bunch of stuff since our Kickstarter closed.   On all fronts we've been making good progress.  In this update there's info about:

  • Electronics
  • Enclosures
  • Software
  • API updates

We're also having a bit of delay due to issues in getting the microcontroller chip in quantity from our vendor. We hope to have that sorted out shortly though.

Electronics

In anticipation of things going smoothing, we started the electronics manufacturing for blink(1) mk2 before we got funded, in late July and early August. It was at that point we placed the order for the components and set our electronics fabricator on making circuit boards. It usually takes about a month to go from emailing PCB layout (a view of that is the image below), a bill-of-materials (BOM), and payment to a finished set of electronics to test. (aside: it's kind of amazing that we live in the future were we can just email out designs and get functional gadgets back in quantity) Our electronics manufacturer has finished fabbing the PCBs and has started on the electronics assembly. pcb

Enclosures

Several weeks ago we hired a firm to start manufacturing of the enclosure pieces. This can take over a month since just building the injection molds (for both the plastic and metal pieces) takes 4 weeks. We were hoping to start that earlier, but the evaluation of different injection molding providers took longer than hoped. We wanted to be sure we found someone who could fabricate the molded anodized aluminum alloy metal frame to our tolerances. One interesting output of the enclosure manufacturing step is turning our 3D CAD models into detail diagrams. These are the ones that look like blueprints and are really great to see how 3D gets systematically flattened to 2D representations: cad

Software

The newly rewritten version of Blink1Control is coming along nicely too. Our programming team has had a functional version working for a week now and is making the functionality have the right artwork and icons. It's looking pretty great. Here's a work-in-progress shot of it. software

API Updates

If you're a developer or just like to poke around software, we've already updated most all the blink(1) API, libraries and sample code to work with blink(1) mk2. We've initially targeted blink1-tool, C/C++, and Java. You can check that out here. https://github.com/todbot/blink1/ Note that any existing blink(1) software will work with blink(1) mk2 (and vice-versa). The only thing you'll be missing is the ability to control the individual LEDs on the mk2. There's also the start of a new multi-modal ThingM-supported Python library that uses either PyUSB or blink1-lib via ctypes, depending on your needs. You can check it out here: https://github.com/todbot/blink1/tree/master/python

Sketching in Hardware 2013

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Last weekend ThingM sponsored, and Mike organized, Sketching in Hardware 2013, held at PARC--the legendary Palo Alto Research Center (where Mike's day job is). This was the eighth annual meeting of people developing tools that make creating with electronics accessible to non-professional engineers. We had a great group of people from as far as Copenhagen and Shenzen. Some were artists, others designers, many were scientists, engineers and university researchers. All were excited to talk about the tools that will make electronics more expressive, and more accessible. Since all 50 attendees gave a presentation (that's one of the rules of the event), there isn't space to summarize everything that everyone said, but here's a sample:

  • David Mellis, of the MIT Media Lab, showed his Open Source mobile phone, and explained the philosophy behind it: the exploration of what happens when there is no distance between a prototype and the final product. Taking ideas of rapid iteration from agile software development and applying it, Dave concludes "If it doesn’t keep evolving, it’s dying."
  • Robert Evans, one of the core Flip Video team, talked about how moving to scale (say 100K+ products) means not just convincing potential consumers that they need to invest in your product, but convincing every single supplier that they need to invest in your idea. It's not about buying parts, it's about getting everyone to believe that it's better to work with you than with ANYONE else.
  • Katherine Moriwaki of Parsons described an amazing program to bring underserved kids together with technology and interaction design to explore new ways of learning and teaching each other. And she introduced a new Open Hardware board, the gadgITERATION noisemaker.
  • Jason Kridner, one of the creators of the Beagleboard, argued that JavaScript should be the programming environment for experimenting with digital hardware experiences, and to prove it showed a prototype JS development environment that lets you do just that.
  • Eric Paulos, of UC Berkeley, asked if the energy you use feels different when you know it was created by your child playing, and what it really means to be an amateur--a lover (from the latin root)--when participating in the invention of new technologies.
  • Yoichi Nagashima, of Shizouka University of Art and Culture, showed a new board, the SUACboard, that brings together four common microcontroller platforms (including Arduino and Gainer) together to create the hardware mashup of the year, one which his students have used to create beautiful work.
  • Jennifer Parker and Gene Felice introduced UC Santa Cruz's OpenLab, which mixes art and technology creation to create a fluid space where--quite literally--anything can happen, from data visualization to carpentry.
  • Ed Baafi further pushed hardware development into the realm of software with Wiring++, which takes the core Arduino wiring library and adds concepts from modern object-oriented languages and operating systems, while keeping the whole thing tiny and lightweight.
  • Josh Walton and James Tichenor showed the latest incarnation of Spacebrew, their interactive space choreography toolkit that integrates and synchronizes many devices running simultaneously to create a single experience.
  • And finally, multiple presentations, from Steve Hodges, Yoshi Kawahara and PARC's own Janos Veres gave glimpses of the next wave of prototyping by showing off amazing inkjet printed electronics (in some cases with printers and ink you can buy today).

We could continue enthusiastically gushing, but instead we'll just point you to the presenters' presentations, available from sketching-in-hardware.com/2013/presentations (currently the presentation is pretty raw--just a directory listing--but we'll get a designed page up there eventually).

Announcing blink(1) mk2

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photo-main We're working on an improved version of blink(1) and have launched a Kickstarter for it.

blink(1) mk2 is an updated version of the blink(1) super status light. The original blink(1) made it easy to connect any data source in the cloud or on your computer to a full-color RGB LED so you can know what's happening without checking any windows, going to any websites or typing any commands. blink(1) mk2 maintains backward-compatibility while adding better functionality and great new features.

The main new features are: - Better USB support - Brighter via dual RGB LEDs - Independently-addressable LEDs - Improved Blink1Control application

We think it's going to be great. blink1mk2-ani