ThingM at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, come visit!

ThingM will be at Maker Faire Bay Area again, come visit us! We'll be showing off blink(1) USB LED notifier, the entire BlinkM Smart LED family, including the wearable BlinkM MinM and the powerful BlinkM MaxM. We'll be demonstrating cool uses of BlinkMs as part of home lighting, art installations, and using them with Arduinos & Raspberry Pis. You can even make a BlinkM into a tiny Arduino by itself.

Additionally, Mike will be giving a presentation on How Design will Reinvent Manufacturing and Tod ll be giving a presentation on how to turn an idea from Arduino sketch to a retail product, using blink(1) as an example.

Maker Faires are a huge amount of fun, packed with exciting things to see and great people to meet. Hope to see you there!

Color changing LED ornament with BlinkM MinM

Thingiverse user GearsOfWow made this really neat 3d-printed LED ornament as a gift for his wife. It contains a BlinkM MinM with a CR123-sized 3V battery.

The entire project is just 50mm square, and most of that is because of the battery. For more details about it, check out the Thingiverse page about it.

blink(1) intro video

I've yet to put together a proper intro / getting started video for blink(1). Here's a minor edit of our Kickstarter video that gives the rundown of the basic idea of blink(1) and how one would use it. To learn more about blink1, check out: http://blink1.thingm.com/.

And here's a 20-second short version of the same thing:

One thing that's pretty obvious in this video is we hadn't settled on the final design yet, except that we wanted the light to come out the sides instead of on the top/bottom faces.

BlinkM MaxM + Atari Punk Console + ukulele = Atari Punk Ukulele.

Our buddy John Park is working on some really interesting ukulele mod using a BlinkM MaxM. It's his Atari Punk Ukulele.

Video of Mike's talk at SF IoT Meetup, quote in FT

Mike gave a great talk at the recent IoT Meetup

March 2013 Event: Mike Kuniavsky from SF IoT Meetup on Vimeo.

Here's a mention of his talk on GigaOm.

And Mike was also recently interviewed for a piece in FT on US gadget manufacturing

Mike speaking at SF IoT, FlexTech Alliance

ThingM co-founder Mike will be speaking at the SF IoT Meetup on 28 Mar 2013 at Runway Incubator.  If you're in the Bay Area, you should definitely check it out.  Get tickets here. He'll also be speaking at this insanely nerdy awesome thing called the "FlexTech Alliance for Displays & Flexible, Printed Electronics" on 17 April 2013 in San Jose.  His topic is "Tiny, Connected and Worn: Rapid Manufacturing, Cloud Services and Wearable Devices".

 

 

 

Goodbye, Kim and THANK YOU

Three and a half years ago, we hired Kim Karlsrud as a temporary project coordinator. Little did we know that she was about to become an indispensable part of the ThingM team (that's her, second from the left). In that time she's done everything from organizing our meetings, running our sales effort, to writing our newsletters, to advising us on ecommerce strategy. She worked with design schools to get BlinkMs into the hands of design students and give us many inspirational ideas in return. She was the glue that held so many of our half-baked, partially working ideas together. Her matter-of-fact approach effectively conceals a ruthless negotiator and hard-nosed businesswoman, a quality that we took advantage of over and over. She became a good friend to me and Tod.

So we were ecstatic when Common Studio, Kim's social design studio with Danny Phillips, had a string of successful projects. Their Greenaid Kickstarter project started their seed bomb gumball machine business (the machines and bombs are now found in stores all over the world) and directly inspired us to do a Kickstarter project. With Common Studio's success, we knew that it was only a matter of time that she would turn her attention to it full-time. We are very grateful for her time and support in transitioning ThingM to a post-Kim world.

Kim, thank you very much. Good luck to you and Common Studio. We will miss you.

Adorable BlinkM cross-stich

Twitter user "Embroidered dog" made this adorable embroidered BlinkM.

So great!

Shapeways your own blink(1) enclosure!

Love your blink(1) but wish the colors came out the top too?  We designed blink(1) so you can swap in a different top or even make your own.  Here's one we got made from Shapeways:

If you've not heard of Shapeways yet, you should go there now and poke around. It's an amazing site that offers an entirely new way for objects to be made and sold.  Instead of a warehouse of products, Shapeways houses a database of 3D files uploaded by creators.  When a customer buys one of the objects, it is fabricated on-demand, from a variety of materials that range from plastic to metal to ceramic.

If you'd like to try this yourself, you can find the blink(1) enclosure parts on our corner of Shapeways:

• blink(1) enclosure top
• blink(1) enclosure bottom

To try this out, we ordered the enclosure top in both the "White Strong & Flexible" and the "White Strong & Flexible Polished" materials.  Cost per top was around $2.75 USD.  The tops arrived in a little over a week, in little plastic bags.

Replacing the stock metal top was easy, just use your fingernail to pop it off, then snap on the new top.

The final result is pretty cool looking, though the Shapeways part is a slightly different shade of white than the neutral white of the blink(1) enclosure:

Or make your own enclosures at home!

If you have access to a 3D printer (like at your local hackerspace), you can also find the STL files to print your own enclosure on Thingiverse.  Note that the STL files we've provided are from our production model, so they may not print well on lower-resolution 3d printers.

blink(1) lights sequenced with Eigenharp Alpha

Eigenharp user Geert recently posted about a blink(1) driver for Eigenharp. Using blink(1)s looks like a great way to provide visual accompaniment to the complex things you can do with an Eigenharp.  His library can control multiple blink(1)s simultaneously and he demos controlling five of them.

Here's a video demonstration:

Check out his post and the code for more info.