NINJA SPHERE: Next Generation Control of Your Environment by Ninja Blocks Your Ninja Sphere learns about you, and your environment. It uses data from sensors and actuators to build a model that can inform you if something is out of place. It can monitor temperature, lighting, energy usage, you and your pets' presence, and anything else you connect to your sphere. By using data from your devices, environment, and location your sphere is able to advise you intelligently and give you control only when you need it. We already support a huge array of devices, but because our approach is open source, almost anybody can write and share a driver to connect a device to your sphere. This essentially future proofs your Ninja Sphere, giving you peace of mind that as new devices come onto the market, your Ninja Sphere can support them. The Spheramid is the gateway that enables the Ninja Sphere. WiFi - Any IP things like smart lightbulbs, IP cameras, smart TVs - anything that connects to your wireless or wired network. USB - The Spheramid is a whole (tiny) computer.
What to do with a 3D Printer: Make Garden Tools This entry was posted on May 21, 2012 by Alex English. The gardening season is here and it's time to get out and work the dirt. Even very traditional home tasks and pastimes like gardening can benefit from a 3D Printer. I've got a few garden accessories that I've designed for myself to use in the garden this season. Hanging Garden Trellis Netting First, I needed a way to hang the trellis for my peas and green beans. Seed Spacer I use a hybrid system to lay out my garden, a combination of square foot gardening and hexagonal plant spacing. This kind of spacing isn't too hard to do by hand, but is much faster and easier with a tool to help. Here are the spacers (4 inches, 3 inches, 2 inches, and 1.5 inches: Here, you can see a bed of radishes planted using 2 inch spacing, and a few radishes harvested from that bed. Here are the designs for the Garden Spacer on Thingiverse, in 4 inch, 3 inch, 2 inch, and 1.5 inch spacings. For a few examples of what you might plant at different spacing: Slug Trap
DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization. the Tricorder project The Free Universal Construction Kit Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys. Fig. 1. Overview Video by Riley Harmon for F.A.T. F.A.T. The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Motivation Our kids are already doing it! Opening doors to new creative worlds is one major reason we created the Free Universal Construction Kit. The Kit offers a “best of all worlds” approach to play and learning that combines the advantages of each toy system. Finally, in producing the Free Universal Construction Kit, we hope to demonstrate a model of reverse engineering as a civic activity: a creative process in which anyone can develop the necessary pieces to bridge the limitations presented by mass-produced commercial artifacts. Download Figure 2. We (F.A.T. Implementation Figure 3. Figure 4. Fig. 9. Keywords
Introducing The MakerBot Replicator™ EmailShare 900EmailShare January 10, 2012 (Brooklyn, NY) – MakerBot Industries is excited to announce the launch of its latest product, The MakerBot Replicator™, which will debut at CES in Las Vegas, NV on Tuesday, January 10th. Available in the MakerBot store for pre-order today! The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. Starting at $1749, The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop. With a build envelope that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread, The MakerBot Replicator™ gives you the power to go big. The MakerBot Replicator™ is ideal for personalized manufacturing, providing a new way to make the things you want and need.
Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment "Interdependence is an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration." --Britta Riley in her May, 2011 TED talk Britta is an artist and technologist from New York, and owns a company called Windowfarms.org. The company makes hydroponic platforms for growing food in city windows, designed with the help of more than 1,800 enthusiastic collaborators from all over the world. Britta took her inspiration from NASA, which uses hydroponics to explore how to grow food in space. NASA (or a large corporation) would be able to fund their own research and development (R&D) to solve the problem, but Britta took a more egalitarian approach. "When we hand over all of our problems to specialists, we cause the kind of problem we see with the food system," she said. Britta decided to open source the project. On a global scale, the project has taken on a life of its own.
Build a Laser 3D Printer - Stereolithography at Home Here is how to make a Stereolithography 3D Printer. It is still a bit of a work in progress but so far it is working pretty well. This is mainly an experiment which started as a Delta Robot Stereolithography Printer but ended as a more traditional Cartesian Stereolithography Printer. "I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. Stereolithography (SL or SLA from Stereolithography Apparatus) is an additive manufacturing process using a vat of liquid UV-curable photopolymer "resin" and a UV laser to build parts one layer at a time. I have wanted a 3D Printer for a while now and there are some very reasonably priced kits available like the Makerbot, Ultimaker and the RepRap project. I decided to enter this in the Epilog Challenge Contest because I could really use a laser cutter :-) I also have some ideas how to redesign this project, for creation on a laser cutter. This project is Open Source Hardware.
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CNC Machines | Sindrian Arts The 2′x4′ Kikori is out! The MDO parts are available now for just $400, but hurry; I’m only offering five at that reward level. After that, they’ll go up to $500. The reason they aren’t cheaper is because only nine pieces actually change between the 4′ version and the 2′ version. I’m also offering the mechanical and full kits at reduced reward levels: for the first three backers the mechanical kit is only $2000, and the full kit just $2500! In other news, since the Artisan’s Asylum is going to be moving to a new location, it’ll be closed during the month of August. I remembered that Joseph Schlesinger, one of the guys who helped me build the the blackFoot at the Asylum, had just moved MakeIt Labs (a “Makerspace/Hackerspace/Open-Access Workshop”) into a new space up in Nashua, so I shot him an email asking if I could set up the Kikori there. I’ve also been hard at work finishing up another reward: the launcher!