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Hearing that Chumby will no longer be selling hardware makes us a little sad. We’ve seen this thing used for so many different things, like shooting people with missiles, spitting out composite video, web serving, stomping around bipedially, and being a 3g router. We knew it wouldn’t be long, since they actually stopped manufacturing last year, but we just couldn’t help but feel a tear come to our eye when it was officially announced. Let us all take a moment of silence.
Sparkfun Electronics has launched an educational web site with a full curriculum of classes being held at Sparkfun Headquarters. If you don’t live nearby, no problem. You can download the entire curriculum as well. It appears that they will have a tutorial section for those who prefer a per-project approach, but that area is still “coming soon”. We love to see people educating others. Good job Sparkfun, looking forward to seeing more content on there.
[Linus Torvalds] pumped out Linux roughly 20 years ago and has now won some pretty major recognition for his contributions. We’ve seen different flavors of Linux installed on virtually everything you can think of, even on a dead badger. This prize is being compared to the Nobel Peace Prize, since there isn’t a Nobel prize for technology(why not?).
While some might be wondering what the big deal about Linux is, consider this quote from the ZDnet article for a moment.
Is it deserved? Well, judge for yourself. Since Torvalds created Linux in 1991, it has become the world’s most ubiquitous operating system it powers the popular Android phones and eight out of 10 financial trades; it runs Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major web networks. It is the dominant OS for supercomputers, supporting nine of 10 of these major systems, and is the preferable platform for cloud computing.
In the Hackaday Froums, [Colecago] shares his experience collaborating with [Ben Heck]. They were building some “Robot Luggage”, and you can see the episode after the break below. The idea was that they would build a piece of luggage that would follow you through an airport instead of having to be dragged.
[Colecago] shares a little about the “behind the scenes process”. There’s a surprising amount of work that goes into a very little amount of video. From what we can gather, this video took over a month to make. [Jesse/Colecago] was quite embarrassed to have run into a mistake that he called “UART Dislexia”, where he repeatedly wired the circuit incorrectly. We say, don’t stress, it happens to everyone.
Another point he brings up is how much of a pain in the butt the Arduino was in this process. While people in the comments often argue about the use of the arduino, [Jesse] explains how this specific case would have been much easier without.
Here’s a cool add on that could making racing games just a little more engaging. How about a real instrument cluster? [Herctrap] has written up the schematics and shared the code to get a real car’s instrument cluster to be driven from x-sim. It is a slightly different approach than we’ve seen before, but really not too complicated.While this is still just another accessory sitting on his desk, it really seems to add a considerable amount of feedback to the game. Next he needs to build a motion rig for his seat!
In a an obvious marketing move akin to a drug dealer offering up free samples, Urban threads is offering free badge plans for hackerspaces that have robotic embroidery machines. We’ve seen this trend of badges coming up lately and we don’t know if it is the boy/girl scout in us, or the punk rocker that makes us pine for them. You may laugh, but look at that skull with the welding goggles on. If you don’t think that’s badass… then we disagree.
The idea of giving some away free isn’t new. You can download free photoshop brushes, free fonts, free circuits and all kinds of other free stuff from sites that sell better versions as well. We just couldn’t pass up the chance to point out that skull, and helping out hackerspaces is always good in our eyes. So, who has one of those embroidery machines?
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