Planet Arduino

Artist duo Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet designed and built an open hardware automated knitting machine called Circular Knitic.

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Holger from Fablab Düsseldorf writes in about a small robot they prototyped with Arduino Uno, helping them  raise some funds for their local space:

We created the idea in our non-commerical FabLab in Düsseldorf, Germany to create a small robot, who makes our vistors and guests aware of placing a small money donation. This robot was required to be transportable, robust and to draw as much attention as possible.
Thus, we included LED-Stripes, servos, sensors and sound to the project. Packed in a very old german vacuum cleaner. The work took about 1 year to construct, print and integrate all 3D-printed parts, wiring and software development with the Arduino Uno. But software development was the minor part, although parallel processing on the Arduino in order to run every component simultaneously required a small trick.

These are the components in action:

• Controller: Arduino Uno R3
• Software: Standard Processing and standard libraries
• Audio: VLSI VS1000 Audio Module incl. our own firmware that lets the Arduino control the board
• Distancesensor: HC-SR04 embedded in a modelled nose of FIMO
• 4 LED stripes (2 RGB on the backside)
• 6 power-LEDs for the top
• 1 servo for moving the top
• 1 Servo for moving the bill-mouth
• 3 distance sensors for bill and coin detection
• 1 switch for muting the audio module and 1 reset button

Take a look at the video below, learn the details on their blog and visit them during the Arduino Day (yes, they are organising an event in their space)!

Last week-end we just had a good time at the Maker Faire of Shenzhen, hosted in the wonderful OCT District.

We were invited by Eric Pan from Seeedstudio (thanks Eric for the good time!). The Maker Faire has been a priceless experience to get in touch with the chinese maker community, as well as networking with different Chinese and Chinese-based maker companies creating interesting contents & products.

We finally inaugurated our very first official Weibo account, and shared chinese materials about Arduino. You could come and play with the Esplora as well as code your very own interface, Thanks to our friend Federico Musto and Anna Kao for the help. and Maling and Terry who volunteered for us in the booth giving Arduino goodies and pins to a ton of interested chinese makers and curious. Zack Smith, working now in the HAXLR8R, joined us for some help to test his chinese language. There has been many speeches and presentations (as well as an Arduino workshop held by Guo Haoyun, the chinese translator of Getting Started With Arduino), and all of a sudden I understood I have to learn chinese (!).

The guys of Haxlr8r showed us their cool creations: Haxlr8r is a startup incubator taking cool ideas and startups from around the world and helping them developing and fine tuning their own product (solve all the puzzles in developing a project, 3 to 6 month) for production here in China. They are based closed to the world famous SEG Electronics Market, widely portrayed from Bunnie Wang in this post and from Evil Mad Scientist here.

On Sunday (totally drained out from the previous day) we teamed up with the Trasfabric “Hacked Better” workshop, we visited Chaihuo Makerspace in OCT where Tom Igoe, Zack Hoeken Smith, Gao Lei, Eric Pan (Seeedstudio) talked about maker movement and DIY culture in China, with Silvia Lindtner (ISTC & Fudan University) and Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai), organizers of the workshop.

I had the cool opportunity to sit back and listen to many interesting facts and odd metaphors, joining the informal panel. The main idea which came out is looking at the city of Shenzen like the place to be for producing (open) hardware right now, perfectly represented in a cool metaphor of Eric:

Shenzen is the Hollywood of hardware products, where big companies are just like the big Majors: that’s where independent, low-budget movies come out. (movies = products, boards).

Zack and Eric, as well as Tom, talked about the the value of Brand, both as Market Identity and Responsibility. Zack: It looks a bit like a recipe. Hambuger. Everybody makes an hamburger. You can go to McDonald / Burger King or in the finest place. You can make it yourself. What are you hungry for? Basically open sour(c)e hardware can get everybody be the very personal cook of themselves, or at least acknowledges, with different tools and know-hows, the audience (maker movement, kids, any of us).

What are you hungry for?

P.S. please keep an eye on the Transfabric blog to a more comprehensive and less informal sum-up of the workshop, I’m just the one who loves Cinema, Hamburger and Open Source Hardware.