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News - AVC Course Preview | about 2 days ago

OK, I had missed that article before. Make needs to be careful about the formula or the event will disintegrate. There was definitely a different feel this year, although it wasn’t necessarily bad/worse, just different. I’ve been to every MF except the first one (had a calendar conflict). There were fewer big installations this year. Noticeably less fabric arts, unless I missed where they hid it. Hugely more robotics. Everybody and their dog is doing 3D printers now. Also, it seemed like the “Kickstarter launch event” — there are certainly some synergies there. Parking and food vendors seemed pricier than in the past — but San Mateo Fairgrounds is driving that. And it is more crowded. It’s less maker-to-maker than in the original days.

One thing made me feel influential, though — there were Morgan manual injection molding machines being demonstrated in both the TechShop and GE/TechShop booths. I was the person that lobbied TechShop to get the IM machine and developed the first training class on it — so I allowed myself a satisfied smile over seeing two of them on site. (Disclaimer: Not associated with Morgan, just a hobby molder.)

News - AVC Course Preview | about 3 days ago

Yeah, that booth was about as minimal as it could get. I didn’t even stop there because it didn’t look like SparkFun had anything to show in the booth. Not even beginner kits to peddle. I guess SparkFun has enough experience with Maker Faire to know what they will get out of it so they can calculate the ROI, but if SparkFun can’t pick up new customers at Maker Faire, then I’d have to say “you’re doing it wrong.”

News - New Product Friday: Will … | about 5 days ago

There is a band (forget the name) that shows up at Maker Faire every year (and other places) and does the Tesla coil speaker thing. It gets old really, really fast. Every single thing they play sounds like the world’s largest swarm of angry bees. It’s a neat hack, but IMHO totally not worth doing. I love music, but I’ll put my effort into instruments that are actually pleasant to listen to. If it only took 10 minutes to hack together, I might try using one of these coils to make the Devil’s Own Kazoo, but I would expect it would hold my interest just about as long as a kazoo. There just isn’t enough variation in tone quality, and the tone is pretty harsh.

News - Fast and Malleable | about 3 weeks ago

It’s important to be clear in your own mind about your goals. I was working at Intel during the launch of the original Pentium, and learned an important lesson about influence by observing what some very smart upper managers did.

Intel was frustrated during the early years of the 486, because many motherboard vendors simply slapped a 486 into 386 motherboards, since the parts were compatible. Unfortunately, without a 486 chipset on the Mobo the 486 was hobbled. This frustrated Intel to no end. So…. Intel started motherboard and chipset divisions. Originally they had no intention of making mobo’s a huge business unit. They went into the business of producing “rabbits”. A rabbit is a design that has the latest features that make people go “ooooh, I need that”. The idea was to create demand pull in front of the clone makers (the hounds) so that they would chase the rabbit. Then when all the clone makers are paving the streets with the latest features, simply declare victory, kill your own production, and move onto producing the next rabbit.

Anyway, my point is if you want to be very influential as opposed to owning a particular market, the cloners are wonderful friends. Influence can be monetized in many interesting, indirect ways.

Product WRL-11049 | about 5 months ago

Yup, I’ve done that, too. Getting that to scale down to small robots is hard, though. Such as BeagleBone + USB stick or Chumby + USB stick. hostapd is great, but getting a WiFi widget in a small package that supports AP mode is just annoying. I made it all work with a Chumby Hacker Board once, but kind of gave up on the CHB as it is just too wimpy and Chumby hacking is just too poorly supported. I’m working with a BeagleBone now, which is of course very new so I haven’t gotten real far as of yet. I was thinking of doing an XBee Cape for the BeagleBone, so the XBee breakout for this module would be a nice fit but if it can’t to AP (and I actually did d/l the manual and it looks like it can’t) then it really isn’t very interesting to me.

I’m thinking of doing a larger robot around an Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard, but even there it is hard to find a WiFi card in Mini-PCIe that supports host mode. A mini-ITX board is awfully big for the robots I build (and hits the batteries pretty hard, too.)

Product WRL-11049 | about 5 months ago

Can this thing be configured for AP mode? (Why, yes, I am too lazy at the moment to d/l the manual :) I just thought somebody might have a quick answer…)

I’ve found that it is very convenient for robots to act as an AP — obviously, there isn’t any back-haul connection, so you can’t route anything, but it sure is convenient if your laptop/phone/tablet can be served a WiFi connection and a DHCP address directly from the robot so that you can talk to it, instead of having to carry along and configure a WiFi AP everyplace you take your robot.

The challenge here is finding something small and low power that will work in AP mode — most of the USB WiFi sticks don’t support AP mode — it can be really vexing to find one.

News - New Product Friday | about 6 months ago

Dimensional accuracy, you say. I say: file, layout dye, scraper. +/– 0.001 or go home. At least, that is what the old time machinists were taught. Ok, I’ll admit that’s going to be bloody hard to do on the end of a small, strangely shaped profile. But, on the bright side, most of the time you don’t need accuracy like that — if so, why are you building in MicroRax? If I do need things super accurate, I use a milling machine. In reality, most of the time I cut MicroRax with a Dremel tool spinning a fiber cut-off wheel. That gives a nice finish.

News - New Product Friday | about 6 months ago

I can understand the overseas shipping issue.

For cutting: Yeah, not everybody has a metal cutting band saw or a milling machine. Really, the main issue is making a square cut. The cheap'n'cheezy solution is to get a very cheap plastic miter box frame (no saw included) which are a few bucks at the hardware store. Dedicate/sacrifice it to metal cutting and just use it with a hack saw. That gets you a square cut. A quick touch up with a metal file afterwards and you have a nice end.

News - New Product Friday | about 6 months ago

Don’t encourage Robert. :) I shudder to think what a nude cosmetics New Product Post would be like…

News - New Product Friday | about 6 months ago

I use MicrRax and love it. Your kits only have chopped up short pieces, though. I’d rather buy the 900mm length pieces and cut them myself. It makes great skeleton framework for larger projects — I use my Makerbot 3D printer to make specialized widgets to hang onto the MicroRax — that’s a great combination. Of course, since it is all standard 3mm hardware and 10mm square beam, it’s pretty easy to add pretty much anything — stock up on 3mm hardware of various lengths, get a 3mm x 0.5 tap, a 3mm tap drill and 3mm clearance drill, and you are pretty much unstoppable.