May 2013
1 post
6 tags
Amazon S3 - a large, far away, widely distributed...
Amazon S3 counts as a gadget, right? :-) I’ve been using it professionally for a while, and of course many of the services we take for granted until us-east-1 goes down use it too. Turns out that you can hook it in to a homebrew website without very much work…
The other day I traced a period of terrible performance (8s network latency getting out of the house) to a visit from...
April 2013
1 post
18 tags
"Chromebook Air" and a trip to Santa Clara
Put my mobility and gadget obsessions to the test by going to Pycon 2013 in Santa Clara. Didn’t take the X220t Thinkpad, just grabbed a Samsung Chromebook a couple of days before leaving (and installed crouton on it.) Crouton gives me a chrooted Ubuntu Precise environment, into which I poured my normal desktop coding and photography workflow. I added a 32G SD card with a couple of months...
February 2013
1 post
6 tags
Programming an Open Source Flashlight
After a year and a half, the HexBright Kickstarter actually delivered. Personally I think it was entirely worth the wait - the developer is clearly kind of obsessive and it’s wonderful the way the internet supports (and/or exploits :-) that. Mechanically, it is very impressive, I’ve been carrying it for a couple of weeks - it’s definitely my large flashlight of choice though...
December 2012
1 post
7 tags
Another mobility path (Asus Transformer TF300T)
Woot had the Asus Transformer TF300T on sale cheap recently, and I’d always been enamored of the form factor - I’d played around with Android/x86 on the EEEpc briefly, even without a touch screen, and I’m certainly one of the people stalling on getting a MacBook Air because it really should have a screen which is a detachable (retina) iPad :-) Likewise the Motorola Atrix was...
November 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Spark WIFI, MakeyMakey, paper computing
Spark WIFI light fixture looks plausible, if only because the Belkin WEMO already exists at a comparable price point. (The Spark is indoor only, and what I actually want is either an outdoor-socket-capable one, or an indoor light switch replacement, ideally one that can be dropped in as one of a pair of three-way switches, which would actually be tricky…) sponsored, not yet funded
I...
5 tags
Android Phone as PDA/Laptop Replacement
I’ve had a dream for a long time of carrying a useful computing environment on me, without being encumbered by it. The first interesting piece of hardware was the Cambridge Z88 (the TRS-80 Model 100 was plausible, but expensive and pretty large; it was the laptop of its day, and at least a decade after for some niches… but the Z88 was the size of an issue of Byte Magazine and ran for days on some...
Pycon.CA and Upverter
I’m at Pycon.CA this weekend (the first native Canadian python conference, in Toronto.) It’s more about code than gadgets, but I want to call attention to one of the sponsors, “Upverter” - I’d kind of ignored them previously as “some cloud thing” but it turns out that they’re actually rather “gadget-interesting” - they’re basically trying to be web based circuit design, github, and tinkercad...
October 2012
1 post
9 tags
KawaiiDuino
TinyDuino and TinyLily The former just smaller than a quarter, the latter just smaller than a dime, yet they have pluggable modules (“shields”) for a variety of features; the “Robotics Kit” pledge level is a couple of TinyLilys with a bunch of motor-drivers (1.8A H-bridge chips on washable circuit boards (pledged, funded, still available)
They’d pair really well...
September 2012
2 posts
5 tags
KickSoftware: bugs, sheet music, soundtracks
BugKick is an AGPL’ed bug tracker (with a hosted option.) Not that we need another bug tracker (especially given my Codes Well With Others ranting) and especially not one written in PHP… but the kickstarter itself is only aiming for a tiny amount of funding to do a couple of months of polish work (and presumably to find out if anyone cares) which would be a novel data point in the...
4 tags
KickScience: Sensors
The “tricorder” may come sooner via Kickstarter than via the Ansari/Qualcomm tricorder X-prize competition, a variety of well-connected sensors have gotten funding recently. The Public Laboratory Spectrometer is the most recent (still open, until October, but already past 200% funding) project to do optical analysis of materials; what makes it interesting is that it’s taking...
August 2012
1 post
5 tags
Hacking gadgets, working gadgets, science! gadgets
The DigiSpark wins hands down as the cutest little Arduino ever, and almost cheap enough to be disposable, which really reduces the potential fear of “screwing one up” in an electronics project (on the software side, of course, you just reset them, so that’s no big deal.) It’s really nice to see such a range of scales for adding “a little bit” of computing to...
May 2012
2 posts
2 tags
Giving Open Source Android apps a Kick
Corbin Champion has a solid start with addi (an Octave-like Android app that has an optional port-of-real-Octave engine, though the other mode is more functional at this time) and is asking for funding to make it a really solid Octave/Gnuplot for Android. He’s got a convincing record of actually doing the work as open source, too.
I know a number of researchers who’d get good use...
6 tags
Colorimeters, Colorful LED displays, and Kicksaver
The IO Rodeo Colorimeter kit is building a basic easy-to-assemble (no soldering!) Open Source Hardware colorimeter - a basic scientific measurement tool, which uses different frequencies of light to measure properties of a liquid sample. The design looks very student-friendly, and is a good start on understanding that instruments aren’t magic…
This 8-digit 7 segment display board is...
April 2012
2 posts
2 tags
The importance of feedback (return of the...
I’ve heard a lot of grumbling about the HexBright Kickstarter which raised $260k/$31k in July 2011, and the developer got trapped doing design improvements - worthy ones, from what I can tell, but there was a severe shortage of communication about the process.
Well, he’s finally re-emerged and started posting details of battery tests, lens and end cap samples, etc. Yay! While...
1 tag
"CordCruncher" headphone cable tangle-preventer
The CordCruncher is a bit lower-tech than usually catches my attention - it was mentioned in passing in a comment on the Pebble E-paper phone-display (record-setting kickstarter, almost $4 million at this writing with a month to go) - skip the marketing video until you’ve watched the “How To Crunch” one down below (or skip to the 0:30 mark to see the first bit where someone uses...
March 2012
2 posts
4 tags
Bluetooth Voltmeter/data-logger, cheap enough to...
“i-Voltmeter” is probably a terrible name for getting the attention of the kind of people who actually want cheap sensors for experimentation, i-Stuff is usually shiny and locked down, whereas this voltmeter is described as Open Source hardware, and really, it’s pretty straightforward to talk to bluetooth devices in general, most of them are “serial ports without...
5 tags
Lytro "Light Field" camera - interesting but...
I’ve taken around 300 pictures with the Lytro (“shiny red” 16G model.) since it arrived 3 days ago. Initial impressions:
the lens and aperture are impressive for the size of the device - but to get a narrow enough depth of field for The Effect to work with, you still need to be relatively close to your subject. There’s a reason the demo pictures are “flower closeup...
January 2012
2 posts
zDevice - let skynet into your home
zDevice (alternate link) is in the same space as the wildly successful Twine box - a “micro appliance” with WiFi and a bunch of sensor/actuator interfaces. Both are trying to be easy to configure; the zDevice looks like it wins more on openness (talks to a local server instead of a “cloud” one, for one thing.) The zDevice kickstarter project is actually including the rest...
5 tags
Useful HDMI hardware (despite the industry's best...
Bunnie just announced that the NeTV was actually available from Adafruit. It’s unusual to see a consumer product where most of the documentation is presented at a crypto hacker conference - though if that’s your thing, it’s also worth taking a look at the Ubertooth One, one of last year’s KickStarter successes, for a similarly near-consumer device which first appeared at...
