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After  participating to Codemotion Rome last month, from the 9th of  May we’ll be spending a couple of days at Codemotion Berlin,  an innovative tech event engaging developers of all languages and technologies.

We’re having an Arduino wearables workshop organized together with Kobakant duo (Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson) and focused on the use of Lilypad.

In these 8 hours workshop we’ll explore how computing can be made wearable using the Arduino Lilypad and a selection of conductive materials to make textile sensors and sew electrical connections.

In order to quickly prototype interactive wearables within the workshop, we’ll provide a selection of open source lasercut felt designs that can readily be assembled to garments and accessories. The textiles sensors and fabric circuits can be stitched into felt and powered by battery to make final stand-alone objects.

The cool thing is that no previous experience in programming or sewing is required to participate, so don’t be shy! Check the details and the earlybird offer on Codemotion website!

The next day, Massimo Banzi, thanx to Maker Faire Rome, is opening the Conference with a keynote speech titled: “People over megahertz”.

Come and join us in Berlin!

**UPDATE**

On the 11th you can join the conversation in the panel starting at 5.20pm with Mika Satomi, Hannah Perner Wilson and Cecilia Palmer:

Makers movement and fashion are getting closer than we think

What happens when fashion and technology get combined? During the panel we’ll explore how the use of low-cost devices and machines is multiplying possibilities of participation and is transforming the way we approach our garments.

I've had my Casio G-Shock for about 8 years now. In that time, it's run out of batteries on me a few times. The first time, I spoke with a shop and they said they had to send it in to Casio to have the battery replaced. The cost would be around $70 and take about two weeks. I then asked if I could replace it myself and they said it was impossible. I checked on the internet and the...

Last february we announced the official dates of  MakerFaire Rome – The European Edition – taking place next October and finally, also released  the Call for Makers to invite tinkerers to enter projects and take part to this event celebrating the makers’ revolution in Italy.

Non we’d like  to start exchanging ideas and presenting you some of the protagonists that’s why we are organizing a series of Hangouts OnAir, to inspire and be inspired by some of our friends who are going to participate.
The first hangout is planned for next monday 22nd of april h.8pm CET – Massimo Banzi will be the moderator and his guests are:

David Cuartielles – Arduino Team – Sweden Addie Wagenknecht – Lasersaur – Austria Marc Bruyere - Snootlab – France Join us on googleplus and see you on monday! (the hangout on-air video will be embedded in this post)

MC33152 is a dual MOSFET driver. Literally half of area is used by 4 large transistors (2 pull-up, 2 pull-down) able to deliver 1.5A with 14ns fronts.
Note how trace thickness changes near large transistors to match flowing current.

Die size 1765x1470 µm.



PS. We had incorrect photo published for MC34063. Now it's fixed.

Me and Viktor got a brief mention in this interesting Dazed Digital article thanks to Lawrence Lek and his BYOB

http://www.dazeddigital.com/blog/article/15979/1/bring-your-own-body

(Den Text auf Deutsch findet Ihr weiter unten)

Today we are announcing the first of a series of video tutorials in german created in collaboration with our friend Max, founder of MaxTechTV and published on Arduino channel on Youtube.

The tutorial of this month explains how to turn your Arduino Esplora into a customized computer gamepad to play any of your videogames. And it’s just the beginning to start the real fun of personalizing the controller: what about configuring it to start a special weapon with a shout using the microphone, included in the board? The options are endless! (here’s the tutorial in english)

For this example we configured the code to be suitable for SuperTuxKart, an open-source racing game we love to play during our breaks!

Enjoy the video below and share with us your new projects made with Esplora, or other Arduino boards, joining our official Flickr Group.

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Wir freuen uns heute das erste Video einer Reihe von Videotutorials auf deutsch veröffentlichen zu können. Die Tutorials werden in Zusammenarbeit mit unserem Freund Max, Gründer von MaxTechTV produziert und auf dem Arduino YouTube-Kanal veröffentlicht .

Das Tutorial des Monats April erklärt wie man den Arduino Esplora  in ein individuelles Gamepad für den Computer verwandeln kann, um jedes beliebige Videospiel damit zu steuern. Und das ist nur eine von vielen tollen Möglichkeiten den Controller zu personalisieren und anzupassen: Wie wäre es das eingebaute Mikrofon zu nutzen, um über einen Sprachbefehl eine ‘Special Weapon’ abzufeuern ? Die Möglichkeiten sind endlos! (Hier das Tutorial auf Englisch)

Für dieses Beispiel haben wir den Code angepasst, um damit das open-source Spiel SuperTuxKart zu steuern, ein Rennspiel, das wir auch gern mal in unseren Pausen spielen.
Viel Spaß mit dem Video! Ihr könnt Eure Projekte mit dem Esplora oder einem anderen Arduino Board in unserer offiziellen Flickr Gruppe teilen.

 

————————————————- Ankündigung

Du sprichst deutsch und möchtest uns dabei unterstützen einen Teil der Arduino Dokumentation in deine Sprache zu übersetzen? Wir haben schon angefangen und hier kann man unseren Fortschritt beobachten: http://arduino.cc/de/Main/Products.

Wenn Du uns helfen willst, schreibe Max (max @ maxtechtv.de) und er wird Dir erklären wie Du in das Gemeinschafts-Übersetzungsprojekt eingebunden werden kannst. Danke!

 

http://www.wired.co.uk/events/2013/04/26

Did some visuals for this super legit video made by Myles Painter for Pseudo Nippon

new-ish vid

In GNOME 3.10 we’ll have translated ICC profiles thanks to all the translators. This should make Alexandre Prokoudine happy indeed.

For applications, libcolord provides a CdIcc GObject if you don’t feel like dealing with wchar_t‘s and ‘mluc‘ objects yourself. Applications that deal with ICC profiles and want to get the localized versions of the description should probably look at this example code in C or in Python.

Comments, as always, welcome.

 

Hello, I am Frank Magazu. I am 16 years old and go to school in Pasco, Florida. I make robots with the Arduino and got interviewed by my school district. Here is a video of me. Thanks for helping me become proficient at robotics as well as electronics and programing in general.

Thank you Frank! You made our day with your email. Keep up with the great work you and your professor are doing to inspire more people in getting involved in diy robots.

 

How cheap can you make a phone?

Recently, I paid $12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.

Also, it would certainly find an appreciative audience in impoverished and developing nations.

$12 is the price paid for a single quantity retail, contract-free, non-promotional, unlocked phone — in a box with charger, protective silicone sleeve, and cable. In other words, the production cost of this phone is somewhere below the retail price of $12. Rumors place it below $10.

This is a really amazing price point. That’s about the price of a large Domino’s cheese pizza, or a decent glass of wine in a restaurant. Or, compared to an Arduino Uno (admittedly a little unfair, but humor me):

Spec This phone Arduino Uno Price $12 $29 CPU speed 260 MHz, 32-bit 16 MHz, 8-bit RAM 8MiB 2.5kiB Interfaces USB, microSD, SIM USB Wireless Quadband GSM, Bluetooth - Power Li-Poly battery, includes adapter External, no adapter Display Two-color OLED -

How is this possible? I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I’m trying to learn. A teardown yields a few hints.

First, there are no screws. The whole case snaps together.

Also, there are (almost) no connectors on the inside. Everything from the display to the battery is soldered directly to the board; for shipping and storage, you get to flip a switch to hard-disconnect the battery. And, as best as I can tell, the battery also has no secondary protection circuit.

The Bluetooth antenna is nothing more than a small length of wire, seen on the lower left below.

Still, the phone features accoutrements such as a back-lit keypad and decorative lights around the edge.

The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a Vanchip VC5276. Of course, with price competition like this, Western firms are suing to protect ground: Vanchip is in a bit of a legal tussle with RF Micro, and Mediatek has also been subject to a few lawsuits of its own.

The MT6250 is rumored to sell in volume for under $2. I was able to anecdotally confirm the price by buying a couple of pieces on cut-tape from a retail broker for about $2.10 each. [No, I will not broker these chips or this phone for you...]


That beats the best price I’ve ever been able to get on an ATMega of the types used in an Arduino.

Of course, you can’t just call up Mediatek and buy these; and it’s extremely difficult to engage with them “going through the front door” to do a design. Don’t even bother; they won’t return your calls.

However, if you know a bit of Chinese, and know the right websites to go to, you can download schematics, board layouts, and software utilities for something rather similar to this phone…”for free”. I could, in theory, at this point attempt to build a version of this phone for myself, with minimal cash investment. It feels like open-source, but it’s not: it’s a different kind of open ecosystem.

Introducing Gongkai

Welcome to the Galapagos of Chinese “open” source. I call it “gongkai” (公开). Gongkai is the transliteration of “open” as applied to “open source”. I feel it deserves a term of its own, as the phenomenon has grown beyond the so-called “shanzhai” (山寨) and is becoming a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem of its own.

Just as the Galapagos Islands is a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem evolved with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation.

Of course, just as the Galapagos was seeded by hardy species that found their way to the islands, gongkai was also seeded by hardy ideas that came from the west. These ideas fell on the fertile minds of the Pearl River delta, took root, and are evolving. Significantly, gongkai isn’t a totally lawless free-for-all. It’s a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching. It’s very different from Western IP concepts, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it.

I’m curious to study this new gongkai ecosystem. For sure, there will be critics who adhere to the tenets of Western IP law that will summarily reject the notion of alternate systems that can nourish innovation and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, it’s these tenets that lock open hardware into technology several generations old, as we wait for patents to expire and NDAs to lift before gaining access to the latest greatest technology. After all, 20 years is an eternity in high tech.

I hope there will be a few open-minded individuals who can accept an exploration of the gongkai Galapagos. Perhaps someday we can understand — and maybe even learn from — the ecosystem that produced the miracle of the $12 gongkai phone.

With the workshop closed out, the next two days were reserved for deployment and installation of the sensor nodes. The night before, I had modified the code the participants were using to harden it a bit for an actual deployment. The main thing I added in was a watchdog timer and protection against a few failure scenarios. The main ones I was concerned about were if the software hangs, if it fails to get an IP address, and if it...

I had one free weekend after arriving at Dharamsala. I contacted Mikey from Air Jaldi, one of the workshop organizers, and he took Jacinta and I around for a site survey and also to discuss the workshop agenda. The workshop consisted of three major parts. The first part was the actual workshop to teach the participants about sensor networks using Arduino. The second and third parts were actual sensor network deployments at the Tibetan Childrens Village (TCV) and Sarah...

I finally arrived in Delhi, India and the first thing I noticed was that immigration was opulent. I was a bit nervous because I was there on a tourist visa but had a huge amount of wireless electronics in my suitcase. If customs checked me, it’s likely they would have confiscated most of the electronics and rendered the workshop useless. Luckily, they didn’t and I was allowed to proceed to the exit. Customs always freaks me out, mostly because I...

yes – after a 13+ hours day of work – we passed EMC compliance testing :=) Actually it was not peace of cake – but with two minor adjustment we could meet the required performance criteria. Details and the associated report will follow in a few days.

Meanwhile some photographs of the finished Hardware:

I will try to finish a couple of devices during the next two weeks and start shipping

continuing the Murphey’s Law topic … I want to present to you an oddity i discovered one single LED PCB (I checked 20 boards and only found 1 with this error).

Here you have a working and a non working version of this PCB – can you figure out the 2 mistakes?

Rather interesting what had happened here. Isn’t it? My guess is that the photo paint in the PCB production progress had some adhesion-problem . It slipped away and was “caught” by a nearby pad …

Sometimes things go wrong – nothing unusual about this – especially when it comes to electronics design …

Due to an old erroneous file that was stored on the CNC-Punching machine this project delayed slightly. In detail we have two holes not punched into the right place. You can see on the picture below. The right part is punched correctly.

Unfortunately the mechanic guy punched all of the 60 pcs. this way – so we produced a whole lot of scrap aluminum. Meanwhile we ordered replacement parts from Hammond – the Hammond people were really helpful and we could order exactly the part that was punched the wrong way, instead of ordering 60 complete (4pcs.) cases. But it delayed our project for about 8 weeks (5 weeks shipping replacement parts – and some time to produce the correct panels). I also screwed up in the past – so i was not really pissed on the mechanics guy. He was also very eager to correct this mistake so i am personally quite happy that we now produced all the needed parts – Nevertheless I want to express myself and do at least something with the screwed up parts so I composed the following picture:

The Ware for April 2013 is below. Click on the image for a larger version.

I found this board while wandering a dimly-lit, obscure corner of the Hua Qiang electronics district on a quiet Sunday. My apologies for the less than optimal photo quality, I only had my cell phone camera on me and I was trying to snap shots while being subtle about it.

I have no idea what this board does, but the mil-spec ratings on the parts immediately caught my eye; I’ve previously come across boards that were clearly from missiles and guidance systems in the markets, but I was unable to get a photo of them, as the vendor wouldn’t allow it.

Some alternate angles of the board are available here and here. Curious to see if anyone can positively identify the ware!

The ware from March 2013 is a serial link card from a Kodak X-ray Medical Imaging Manager. As Julien was the first to identify it, he’s the winner, congrats and email me for your prize!

Sorry for the short synopsis of the ware, it’s been a busy month and I’m struggling to keep up…