In 2016 while visiting Shenzhen factories for a client, I wanted to hunt the markets for my favorite toys, dumb wearables, in order to learn from the design and see what parts are common and cheap. I bought everything I could until I found these veryfit …
At the Hackaday Superconference this year Blaine and I finally decided to try our hand at a conference badge puzzle. The cambadge was introduced a month before the conference with the source code following shortly after so you you could prepare hack idea…
Advanced circuits is a very high quality United States board house. They have a cheapish PCB service called 33each for small runs, though it generally doesn't compete with OSHPark if you ask me. Its only when you're doing a bunch of boards (~20-50) that t…
You might have used ino and stino for Arduino builds within in sublime, but ino has been very poorly supported for some time now. Ive Previously used the recently released Arduino CLI for automated testing so I decided to hack those features into a proper…
Im excited to announce that Iced Dev and myself shipped a product I've been consulting on over the past few months, the Parallax IDE for Chrome. This allows teachers in schools around the world to continue their Parallax Basic Stamp curriculim in a world…
So much can go wrong between your code and the Arduino in the real world. Its vital to keep removing the possible errors in this chain. The lowest hanging fruit we're missing in the Arduino community is testing. We should really be unit testing our code l…
Today I built an stk500v1 programmer in pure javascript freeing javascript folks from ever having to use the Arduino IDE (or avrdude) again. Instead: npm install stk500 node uno.js As we continue to reach out and teach new people hardware through softwar…
I was lucky enough to attend @marcbarros's Hardware Workshop SF 2014. I can't say enough how valuable the content was, how giving all the advisors were, and how excellent all our peers are. If you're a first time founder you need to get to one of these. …
You've Probably seen kilobot swarm videos going around. Luis wanted something fun to do with his LightBlue Bean so I set to turn my bean into a remote controlled swarm style bot. DESIGN For construction I followed the rabbit hole to find the …
Another day, another Firmata fork. I spent the last few days messing around with getting Firmata working on the LightBlue BLE Bean. I had previously written the Node NPM package for the Bean as an exercise to get to know both Node and the Bean. Why not g…
Photo Gareth Halfacree. As part of my work with the soon to be launched Octoblu I've been working on porting Firmata over to Spark Core. The Spark's arduino abstraction has really come along making it the cheapest connected arduino out there, and me pret…
I recently appeared on my buddy Karl’s new podcast, Spark Gap Podcast Episode 8 this week to talk about "iot". Join us, won’t you?
In doing some work recently I had the pleasure of obtaining a bunch of new http://www.pinocc.io scouts -- Internet of Things Arduinos! The Lead Scout has wifi and talks to the other scouts nearby via mesh networking (non compliant Zigbee sadly). After pla…
iFirmata hit the Apple app store today! iFirmata lets you connect to your Arduino to your idevice via a BLE connection (Xadow or RedBear currently) using the awesome open source Firmata protocol. It lets you connect to your Arduino and do all the things …
My new MacOSX application memoryIO has been approved to the iTunes app store! memoryIO gives you a taste of lifelogging by saving a photo to your Photos directory every time you open your Mac. And its free! Check it out at http://www.memory.io
Colin and I needed to find some way to attach wearable electronics to the body for body jewelry and wearable computing type applications. Eventually we hope piercing and other body modification technologies will allow us to do permanent attachment, but d…
I've been struggling with the topic of toxic communication and poisonous people in our community spaces for years now. Only recently though have I been able to start collecting my thoughts and looking for answers. Today I saw that Openfly wrote an interes…
Last week I got to talk at about my most recent hack, a flexible haptic strip that easy for anyone to use, at Hack N Tell Round 25 in NYC. In between working for ASU's Cubic lab on a new haptic strip, I was pondering ways to bring haptics more to the for…
This week I used the laser to cut some holes in my enclosures to make way for switches, light pipes, etc. My previous attempts pre-hackerspace (with a dremel) were.. rough. There had to be a better way! The big problem with using the laser was jigging …
Colin loaned me his Pebble until he gets back into town next month and I haven't seen anyone else in our circle review it, so here goes. Who Needs the Time? First some setup. I don't wear watches and almost never have. Its a modality I think underutilized…
Recently for a client project I needed to read credit card data to an Arduino. It didn't seem like it would be too hard or expensive since square gives out readers by the handful for free. I was only mildly familiar with the technology so I turned to wiki…
If you’ll remember from previous posts my wishlist was to upload thumbnails(which should be available in metadata) instead of full images, do that in descending order from time shot so that if we have an internet outage we don’t get behind, and probably d…
We picked up the Hero3 to test with our current mods. Our understanding is this is basically the Hero2 in new packaging, though about half as deep and with an advertised battery life claim of something like 8 hours! We put it to the test with our boards …
TLDR; We now have geotagged photos and our uploads occur automatically at the end of the day via ftp! Thanks EyeFi! I bought the new EyeFI pro x2 today mainly because it supports FTP and wifi geotagging. We figured we might be able to get some of these …
I've been asked for stiched videos from the camera, so here are links to 3. A day at HeatSync fixing the 3D Printer Me napping on the (purposely uncomfortable) NapSync Labs couch My Fast and Furious driving
Recently my hetero life partner Colin Ho and I turned a GoPro Hero into a lifelogger camera. I've wanted to do life logging forever but never got my stuff together so when Colin brought in the camera in and made the challenge, I was in. Take a look at …
For my ongoing Arduino watch project, we want to be able to do frequency detection in order to blink an led to bass hits. There are a few Fast Fourier Transforms that have been written on Arduino including this one and this one. However, I needed my libra…
A year ago as an experiment in sales and in the in the ability for passion and ownership to drive responsibility in a community space, I set up a store inside @heatsynclabs to resell acrylic for our new laser cutter. At HeatSync we have many people usin…
From April 3rd to May 3rd I visited China with Mitch Altman's second, hacker trip to China. We visited five hackerspaces, two Maker Faires, Seeed Studios, factories and lots more! I asked Mitch a series of questions about how the trip came about, what he …
I've been asked over and over again about my experiences in China during my 30 day trip so I thought I'd round up some of the most asked questions and answer them here: How do [those people] live under such repression? Just fine, actually. They distrust …
By now you should have noticed that Makerbot has announced their new 3D printer, th Replicator, and over the past few months has started shipping them. Further of note, the Thingomatic(TOM) is now End of Life(EOL) though Makerbot is committed to supportin…
This past winter 2011 Tim Gerrits and I were lucky to be invited to work with Boyd Branch, Daniel Roth and Southwest Scrap Exchange on a small arts center grant for Mesa Festival of Creativity 2012. The grant concept was a "Desert Playground" w…
Makerbot announced on their twitter account this past tuesday that there was a 'big announcement' coming at CES next week. It floated the hash tag #makerbotpredictions to spur discussion of what that might be during the leadup. Some on Twitter have postul…
This is the first in a series on a series of guest posts from Prescott Ogden (@prescottogden) discussing print defects, why they occur and what to do about them. In the course of raftlessly printing dozens of mrule's Polyhedron Vertices, I've encountered…
We’ve been printing for 2 years now at HeatSync and I thought I’d put together some of my top tips for new printer owners. Some of them are hard won, others are from other bloggers in the Rep Rap/Makerbot community over the years so as such I’ll take no …
We're doing a ton of 3d printing at the lab right now with Moheeb's Thingomatic and our Fakerbot. Moreso, Prescott and I are talking about a custom MK7 extruder for the Fakerbot, Moheeb and I are talking about reviving the Mendel with new Prusa parts, an…
Today, with the announcement of availability of the Up fitness band, I believe Jawbone has signaled their intent to become a strong competitor in the Quantified Self and body computing market. The Up, available Nov 6, will log body movement and, along wit…
It looked like I should just be able to alter newsoftserial.cpp and newsoftserial.h to take a uint_16 instead of 8, and then just step over 9 bits instead of 8 and I should have a pretty simple solution for RX. My first problem is NSS sadly virtualizes …
I've been torn on what 3d printing technology to look into next. The Fakerbot has still been far too finicky and far too difficult for most of our users to use on a regular basis. I've personally moved away from the idea of the Rep Rap for now. I'ts a b…
@VirgilVox's new Thing-o-Matic that arrived this weekend! It was a pretty easy build for him, except for the usual firmware programming issues (for the motherboard I just had a better timing touch, for the extruder we re-burned the bootloader and still co…
Today I developed custom brackets and installed into our Love-able Fakerbot the Gen4 mechanical endstops. When we ordered our Gen4 electronics from Makerbot they came with 3 endstops, though the cupcake wasn't terribly suited for them out of the box. I …
I've done some reasearch on arduino, atmel and 9 bit serial. Again my goal is to stay as much in the Open Source toolchain as possible so that I don't have to support any more than I have to, and so my result is as standardized as possible: The arduino s…
@intel_jim brought over a new set of 3d prints for our little 'showcase' of 3d printing technologies. These are from the local print house PADT and show off several prints mixing various rubbers and plastics in various configurations. My understanding is…
I'm mainly working off of the specifications document by the NAMA people located at http://www.vending.org/technology/MDB_Version_4-1.pdf Pinout: GRN 6 MCommon 3 NC RED 5 MTX 2 0DC BRN BLK 4 MRX 1 34DC WHT Serial Communications: 9600 1 start bit, 8 bits d…
I've always been fascinating by vending machines. Theres something romantic about the defunct automats. I see their return in our future, especially as we move to a service based economy, and then look to take more cost out of that sector. I look to ubiqo…
[This post is from our 3dprinting wiki and is being added here and backdated for completeness] The machine is called a FakerBot, because it's not quite a MakerBot, but there is a direct lineage. Since we didn't have access to a laser-cutter and we wanted …
Around October of 2009 HeatSync began planning to build a 3d printer as one of our first community projects. We had just been incorporated and the Rep Rap Mendel had just been released. It was heady times. It is now a year later we've lost a lot of good m…
Several years ago Verizon announced they'd be opening up their cellular network to devices other than cell phones with the big gotcha that all devices would have to be lab certified. Years went by and there was the Kindle and it was good. But now, with th…