Paying China to reverse engineer for you

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 …

3 minute read 23 November 2017

Hackaday Superconference Badge Hacking

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…

13 minute read 15 November 2017

Kicad to Advanced Circuits for PCBs and Assembly

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…

5 minute read 22 February 2016

Sublime Build System for Arduino

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…

0 minute read 18 June 2015

Parallax IDE for Chrome

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…

0 minute read 01 May 2015

Automated Build Testing for Arduino Libraries

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…

2 minute read 01 April 2015

No more Arduino IDE - Program your Arduino from Node or Chrome

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…

1 minute read 24 November 2014

My #hardwareworkshop SF 2014 Notes

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. …

10 minute read 14 September 2014

Lightblue BeanBot

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 …

3 minute read 11 September 2014

Firmata on LightBlue Bean

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…

1 minute read 31 August 2014

Firmata on Spark Core

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…

2 minute read 31 August 2014

THE SPARK GAP PODCAST - EPISODE 8

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?

0 minute read 06 August 2014

Advanced Pinoccio

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…

5 minute read 23 April 2014

iFirmata now in the App Store

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 …

1 minute read 29 January 2014

Basic Eagle CAD workflow and gotchas from HeatSync Labs Hot Topics series

0 minute read 03 November 2013

memoryIO now in App Store!

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

0 minute read 25 October 2013

Body Jewelry / Wearable Electronics Adhesives Roundup

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…

3 minute read 08 October 2013

Toxicity, Inclusivity, and Community Size

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…

3 minute read 03 October 2013

LED Light Strip Hacked for Haptic Motors

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…

2 minute read 27 August 2013

Lasering PCB enclosures

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 …

1 minute read 27 March 2013

Pebble review

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…

3 minute read 26 March 2013

Card Reader Roundup and Teardown

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…

3 minute read 25 March 2013

Live uploading from the GoPro Lifecam

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…

1 minute read 23 January 2013

New GoPro, case design and website!

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 …

1 minute read 08 December 2012

Geotagged GoPro photos via EyeFi

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 …

2 minute read 05 November 2012

LifeCam Videos

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

0 minute read 27 October 2012

Turning GoPro into a lifelogging camera

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 …

2 minute read 17 October 2012

Recently some people at our hackerspace HeatSync Labs asked for me to update them on The State of Body Computing. This is a...

0 minute read 17 October 2012

Goertzel Arduino Library

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…

1 minute read 25 June 2012

I'm a circuit designer and have been 3D printing for years. I've come to the point now where I want to enclose my electronics to...

0 minute read 24 June 2012

The Acrylic Magnate Turns One Year Old

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…

8 minute read 11 June 2012

Interview: Mitch Altman's Hacker Trip to China 2

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 …

13 minute read 16 May 2012

Another white guy spends 30 days in China and thinks he knows things (or China Q/A)

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 …

3 minute read 15 May 2012

Replicator Reflections

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…

1 minute read 07 May 2012

Back from China (and Hong Kong) and now on Tumblr.

0 minute read 07 May 2012

Festival of Creativity Desert Playground Recap

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…

1 minute read 10 April 2012

Makerbot's "big announcement" due next week

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…

1 minute read 06 January 2012

Print defects: Flashing

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…

2 minute read 03 January 2012

Top 10 Makerbot/Rep Rap Upgrades and Tips

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 …

6 minute read 13 December 2011

3D printing night @heatsynclabs

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…

0 minute read 23 November 2011

I was invited to speak at UAT on the state of Additive Manufacturing!

0 minute read 20 November 2011

Body computing goes mainstream as Jawbone announces the Up

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…

1 minute read 04 November 2011

Altering New Soft Serial NSS for 9 bit- cans of open source worms

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 …

2 minute read 25 October 2011

Whats next?

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…

1 minute read 24 October 2011

Thingomatic Build @heatsynclabs

@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…

1 minute read 23 October 2011

Limit switches and homing

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 …

0 minute read 18 October 2011

MDB - 9 bit serial research

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…

0 minute read 18 October 2011

3D Printing Showcase

@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…

0 minute read 15 October 2011

The MDB Specification for lay people

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…

0 minute read 08 October 2011

Re-engineering vending electronics

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…

1 minute read 02 October 2011

Fakerbot Lives

[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 …

2 minute read 01 March 2011

History of the world, part 1

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…

0 minute read 28 October 2010

Bug labs just announced the future and I'm not sure anyone noticed

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…

0 minute read 24 September 2010