“Physicianeer” Derek O’Keefe sees the future of medicine and engineering converging in the form of digital doctors. Relying heavily on wearable technology O’Keefe works with NASA to remotely monitor astronauts health and to diagnose from vast distances.
Check out the Ted Talk on YouTube to see how he believes wearable tech will influence the health industry (and some ways it already has):
Through his work remotely monitoring aquanauts for NASA, Derek O’Keeffe has developed an interest in how technological advances are allowing more medical procedures and checkups than ever to be performed from the comfort of our own homes, and looks at how we can expect our everyday lives to be transformed in the not-so-distant future. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
1885 – New York state government officials establish the Niagara Falls State Park reservation, thus creating the first official New York State Park.
Olmsted and others formed the Niagara Falls Association in 1883, a group that aimed to lobby New York to acquire and protect the falls from private exploitation. Their efforts succeeded later that year when, on April 30, 1883, a bill authorizing the “selection, location and appropriation of certain lands in the village of Niagara Falls for a state reservation” was signed into law by then-governor Grover Cleveland. The act led to the establishment of the Niagara Reservation in 1885.[3][10] New York State Assemblyman Thomas Vincent Welch figured prominently in getting the bill signed, and served as the first Superintendent of the Park for 18 years from its inception until 1903.
Niagara Falls State Park is claimed to be the oldest continuously-operating state park in the United States and the first established via eminent domain.
1897 – J.J. Thomson announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle at the Royal Institution in London.
In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles (now called electrons), which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio.[2] Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph.
On April 30, 1939, a very hot Sunday, the fair had its grand opening, with 206,000 people in attendance. The April 30 date coincided with the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration, in Lower Manhattan, as the first President of the United States. Although many of the pavilions and other facilities were not quite ready for this opening, it was put on with pomp and great celebration.
David Sarnoff, then president of RCA and a strong advocate of television, chose to introduce television to the mass public at the RCA pavilion. As a reflection of the wide range of technological innovation on parade at the fair, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech was not only broadcast over the various radio networks but also was televised along with other parts of the opening ceremony and other events at the fair. On April 30, 1939, the opening ceremony and President Roosevelt’s speech were seen on black and white television sets with 5 to 12-inch tubes.[7] NBC used the event to inaugurate regularly scheduled television broadcasts in New York City over their station W2XBS (now WNBC). An estimated 1,000 people viewed the Roosevelt telecast on about 200 television sets scattered throughout the New York metropolitan area.
Later in his career at NRL, Easton conceived, patented, and led the development of essential enabling technologies for the United States Global Positioning System (GPS). During the 1960s and early 1970s he developed a time-based navigational system with passive ranging, circular orbits, and space-borne high precision clocks placed in satellites. The idea was tested with four experimental satellites: TIMATION I and II (in 1967 and 1969) and Navigation Technology Satellites (NTS) 1 and 2 (in 1974 and 1977). NTS-2 was the first satellite to transmit GPS signals.
1993 – CERN announces that World Wide Web protocols will be free.
The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.[27] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Window System.
This project is an animated figure of Cogsworth from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I began this project to learn more about designing animatronics and the program required to bring them to life. For this design, I wanted to develop a program that would allow Cogsworth to wiggle back and forth every hour the same number as the hour and finish with a bow.
This project is an animated figure of Cogsworth from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I began this project to learn more about designing animatronics and the program required to bring them to life. For this design, I wanted to develop a program that would allow Cogsworth to wiggle back and forth every hour the same number as the hour and finish with a bow.
Working with acrylics, gouache and watercolour, the Mexican artist also uses a radical technique called “blind contour drawing” – which means you never take your eyes off the subject you’re painting, not even to check what you’re doing on paper.
With this approach, Ana’s painted characters are far from perfect. In fact, most are warped, taking on curved limbs and features throughout. “I play with the disruption of the human form to reveal my view on both internal and external beauty,” she explains.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
The name of the exhibition, “The Art Happens Here,” comes from a 1997 diagram by an artist duo named MTAA, depicting a lightning symbol in between two computers and an arrow pointing to it saying, “The art happens here.” “They wanted to show people that the artwork wasn’t something shown on a screen but it was more about an encounter they were having with other users,” Rhizome’s artistic director, Michael Connor tells The Verge, “There’s no object. The whole idea of a net art is based on things coming together in this live way.”
“The Art Happens Here” suggests that web archives can also be art. Different artifacts of the web from diverse cultures, circumstances, and pockets of the internet are salvaged in the exhibit.But while creating art, many of these artists have left raw commentary about extremely important historical events. For example, there’s a Miao Ying’s Blind Spot, a Chinese dictionary with 2,000 terms whited out, which reflects terms that would come back censored when you tried to search for them on Google in China in 2007.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
We’ve love to see a time-lapse of this sculpture! Or ya know, to travel to Borgo Valsugana to see it with our own eyes. From Colossal:
On designing Reservoir, Grade studied the Park’s ecosystem, carefully planning the installation in harmony with the surrounding landscape. “I became most interested in the way rain falls through this grove of trees, the canopy delaying the droplet’s journey to the ground as well as how quiet and sheltered the forest was during a heavy rain,” Grade tells Colossal. “I wanted to make a sculpture that responded to the rain directly as well as a sculpture that responded to people.”
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
“Planting trees is political,” Katie Holten told Hyperallergic. And soon, plantings in New York City may spell out messages of resistance, love, or other expressions from the local community. In dialogue with the NYC Parks Department, the Irish-born, New York-based artist designed the New York City Tree Alphabet. Ranging from the elm with its twisting branches for “E,” to the cone-shaped umbrella pine for “U,” each letter of the Latin alphabet is used to highlight one of the city’s native or non-native trees. The selections also represent how the urban forest is transforming due to environmental changes.
“In a sense, the entire A to Z itself is a reflection of climate change,” Holten said. “I wouldn’t have felt compelled to make [the New York City Tree Alphabet] if everything was hunky dory. A large part of the project is the simple fact that it’s a fun, accessible way for people to learn about New York City trees and see how natives, non-natives, and other species new to New York City are all being planted together.”
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
In 1995, nearly a tenth of the internet was net art. Artists were early to join engineers on the web, entering via the first public browser in 1993. Most net art from this period is irretrievable, never modified to be compatible with newer software. In theory, the internet should age as a perfect archive; in practice, its record of the past is patchy, tearing wherever ambitious futures have stretched the network too thin.
The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics at the New Museum restores selectively from the internet’s history. The exhibition takes place mostly offline; with only five of its 16 objects displayed on computers, The Art Happens Here favors the less-technical definition of net art, as material based in or on internet cultures. The internet culture of Olia Lialina’s slideshow Give Me Time/This Page is No More (2015-ongoing), for example, is GeoCities, a popular hosting service acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 and dismantled a decade later. Lialina projects a diptych of screenshots of GeoCities pages, with bloggers on the left promising to revive their pages’ activity and those on the right renouncing their efforts altogether. Both sides profusely thank (“THNX!”) and apologize (“SORRY!”) — an example of internet etiquette extended to an unknown, where a stranger’s attention should be acknowledged but never presumed.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Mr. Trash Wheel, a floating mechanism with large round eyes affixed to its hood, was installed on a tributary leading to the Baltimore Harbor in 2014. Since then, the trash-scooping object has intercepted 638,594 plastic bags, 1,000,000 styrofoam containers, 150 miles of cigarette butts, and one ball python. Using the power of the sun, the semi-autonomous machine rakes litter out of the water and up a slow but sturdy conveyer belt. The belt is strong enough to hoist mattresses, trees, and kegs from the water and into a dumpster located on a separate barge for recycling and disposal.
The device was created by sailor and engineer John Kellett who watched debris build up around Baltimore’s waterfront for over twenty years. Mr. Trash Wheel has helped lead to Maryland’s statewide ban on Styrofoam food containers (a first in the country), partly because of a loyal Twitter following by local fans who are witness to the devastating amount of trash intercepted each day.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
George Berzsenyi is a retired math professor living in Milwaukee County. Most people have never heard of him.
But Berzsenyi has had a remarkable impact on American science and mathematics. He has mentored thousands of high school students, including some who became among the best mathematicians and scientists in the country.
Origami is not new. I’m truly surprised that it’s taken this long to openly get the credit it deserves for being a source of inspiration for artists, engineers, and mathematicians.
While we think of origami as art, it increasingly is being used by companies and researchers in space, medicine, robotics, architecture, public safety and the military to solve vexing design problems, often to fit big things into small spaces. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers now includes origami in its annual conferences. So has the American Mathematical Society.
At the center of that transformation is a small number of scientists and engineers championing the practical applications of the Japanese art. Foremost among them is Lang, a passionate proselytizer for the art and the science of origami. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Caltech and a master’s degree at Stanford University, both in electrical engineering, before finishing a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. He folded throughout as a way to relax, designing mostly bugs and animals—a hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant. Some took him weeks to design and hours to fold. Shortly after he began working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1988 (Lang has published more than 80 papers and has 50 patents), he folded a life-size cuckoo clock.
Motown Musician Accelerator’s 12-week program provides coaching, mentoring, industry networking, and grants to cohorts of four musicians and/or bands. It ends with a showcase, where the artists perform for music industry professionals, supporters and community members.
gBETA Musictech works exclusively with startups building music-related products, services or content. This includes technologies related to sourcing, recording, production, distribution, marketing, touring, licensing and streaming as well as any technology or process innovations that could serve any component of the music industry.
Motown Musician Accelerator’s 12-week program provides coaching, mentoring, industry networking, and grants to cohorts of four musicians and/or bands. It ends with a showcase, where the artists perform for music industry professionals, supporters and community members.
gBETA Musictech works exclusively with startups building music-related products, services or content. This includes technologies related to sourcing, recording, production, distribution, marketing, touring, licensing and streaming as well as any technology or process innovations that could serve any component of the music industry.
Motown Musician Accelerator’s 12-week program provides coaching, mentoring, industry networking, and grants to cohorts of four musicians and/or bands. It ends with a showcase, where the artists perform for music industry professionals, supporters and community members.
gBETA Musictech works exclusively with startups building music-related products, services or content. This includes technologies related to sourcing, recording, production, distribution, marketing, touring, licensing and streaming as well as any technology or process innovations that could serve any component of the music industry.
Here is some ominous news from Amazon’s autonomous employee tracking systems. As Amazon incorporates more and more robotic solutions, some of the human employees fear they are being treated like robots themselves.
A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today. Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons.
The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations.
Wired recently ran a brief history of open source software and there are a few pieces worth diving into. You might wonder why companies like Google would bother making open source software when it’s a potentially lucrative product to sell or lease to its massive user base. The answer is that their goals and business models are different than a traditional software company, and open source aligns with a longer term strategy.
[Google] hoped outside developers would make the software better as they adapted it to their own needs. And they have: Google says more than 1,300 outsiders have worked on TensorFlow. By making it open source, Google helped TensorFlow become one of the standard frameworks for developing AI applications, which could bolster its cloud-hosted AI services. In addition to garnering outside help for a project, open source can provide valuable marketing, helping companies attract and retain technical talent.
So there is symbiotic relationship at play, but there is something a little more self serving here.
Let’s say a company makes its own version of TensorFlow with unique elements, but keeps those elements private. Over time, as Google made its own changes to TensorFlow, it might become harder for that other company to integrate its changes with the official version; also, the second company would miss out on improvements contributed by others.
Google opens up its doors and invites people in to use its software, and because it’s free its really attractive. This in turn locks companies into its services and keeps them developing for the platform. A low barrier to entry and an increasingly improving framework keeps 3rd party developers along for the ride and making there platform better.
…money isn’t the only problem. The open source workforce is even less diverse than the tech industry as a whole, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by GitHub. Half of the respondents had witnessed bad behavior—such as rudeness, name calling, or harassment—and said it was enough to keep them away from a particular project or community. Around 18 percent of survey respondents had experienced such bad behavior firsthand. That’s a problem because working on open source projects is now an important part of landing a job in technology. If women and minorities are shut out of open source, then the technology industry as a whole becomes that much less diverse.
These problems are in part due to a lack of general oversight and uniform leadership structure, but these kinds of things still manage to happen in companies with strict hierarchies, expensive lawyers, and robust HR teams.
One way many open source projects are trying to address the issue is through a code of conduct called the Contributor Covenant, which warns participants against personal attacks, harassment, or “other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.” As common sense as these guidelines might sound, they’ve proved controversial among open source coders used to being judged solely on their code, not their professionalism—or lack thereof. The author of the Contributor Covenant is still periodically harassed.
Open source technology is the backbone of today’s computing, but there are still some issues that need ironing out before it’ll be the foundation for the future.
Here is some ominous news from Amazon’s autonomous employee tracking systems. As Amazon incorporates more and more robotic solutions, some of the human employees fear they are being treated like robots themselves.
A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today. Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons.
The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations.
Great piece on the history of The Frisbie Pie Company and its recent resurrection from Gastro Obscura.
The Frisbie Pie Company got its name from William Russell Frisbie, a Civil War veteran who moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1871 to manage a new branch of the Olds Baking Company. Soon, Frisbie purchased the bakery and renamed it after himself. After his death in 1903, his son, Joseph Peter Frisbie, took over. Along with opening bakeries in Hartford, Poughkeepsie, and Providence, Joseph created a pie rimmer modeled after a potter’s wheel, and a cruster that could process 80 pies in a minute.
In his latest video, Alex Ball talks with Alan Howarth about the soundtrack to the John Carpenter film Escape From New York.
Howarth discusses how he got his foot int the door in Hollywood, doing sound design for films like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and how that led to doing soundtracks with Carpenter. He also talks about the gear he used in creating the score to Escape From New York and the process used in creating the soundtrack.
Watching rockstars destroy guitars on stage usually gives me anxiety (yes, I realize I’m uncool), which is why the idea of a ‘smash-proof’ guitar sounds so appealing.
henrik loikkanen, machining process developer at sandvik coromant, has played guitar since his youth, when he idolized malmsteen. to understand what happens when malmsteen destroys an instrument, loikkanen turned to youtube. ‘we had to design a guitar that is unsmashable in all the different ways you can smash a guitar,’ loikkanen said. ‘the engineering challenge was that critical joint between the neck and the body that usually cracks on a guitar.’
The video takes inspiration from Brian Eno‘s concept of Generative Music. Eno has been creating systems for generating music since the 70’s.
While he initially applied this approach to ambient music, on albums like Music For Airports, his later work has explored creating systems for generating other types of music, too.
I hate to say that we already missed it this year *BUT* it is such an amazing event that I have to mention it. And since this is so far ahead, it also gives you time to plan for the next one.
The Museum celebrates natural history collections by inviting visitors to bring in their own specimens for our annual Identification Day. Get an up-close look at specimens from the Museum’s rarely seen collections, while scientists attempt to identify your discoveries.
Participating scientists include researchers from Anthropology, Botany, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Entomology, Herpetology, Ichthyology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Mammalogy, Microscopy, Ornithology, Paleontology.
We absolutely love Names Dress – a new project from designer and artist Sylvia Heisel. A big thanks to Sylvia for including our very own Limor Fried!
Sylvia Heisel, head of design lab Heisel and fashion tech pioneer, is the creator of The Names Dress, a wearable, compostable conceptual art piece engineered with over 300 handwritten, 3D printed names of women in STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math). The making of the dress was a collaboration among friends and colleagues: designed from 2D to 3D in Morphi 3D design software on iPad and 3D printed in parts on Ultimaker 3D printers using BioInspiration’s WillowFlex flexible, compostable bio-plastic.
We absolutely love Names Dress – a new project from designer and artist Sylvia Heisel. A big thanks to Sylvia for including our very own Limor Fried!
Sylvia Heisel, head of design lab Heisel and fashion tech pioneer, is the creator of The Names Dress, a wearable, compostable conceptual art piece engineered with over 300 handwritten, 3D printed names of women in STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math). The making of the dress was a collaboration among friends and colleagues: designed from 2D to 3D in Morphi 3D design software on iPad and 3D printed in parts on Ultimaker 3D printers using BioInspiration’s WillowFlex flexible, compostable bio-plastic.
We absolutely love Names Dress – a new project from designer and artist Sylvia Heisel. A big thanks to Sylvia for including our very own Limor Fried!
Sylvia Heisel, head of design lab Heisel and fashion tech pioneer, is the creator of The Names Dress, a wearable, compostable conceptual art piece engineered with over 300 handwritten, 3D printed names of women in STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math). The making of the dress was a collaboration among friends and colleagues: designed from 2D to 3D in Morphi 3D design software on iPad and 3D printed in parts on Ultimaker 3D printers using BioInspiration’s WillowFlex flexible, compostable bio-plastic.
Here is the always fascinating Ethan Hein on the deep influence of Herbie Hancock’s track “Rockit” and the iconoclastic live performance from the 1984 Grammys that broke turntable scratching and breakdancing into the mainstream.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label from dropping him.
Herbie’s performance of the song at the 1984 Grammys had a colossal impact. Few people watching the broadcast had ever heard (or heard of) turntable scratching. If you watch Scratch, one interviewee after another cites this broadcast as their inspiration for getting into turntablism. Breakdancing was probably new to most viewers as well. Even twenty-five years later, the whole thing remains fresh.
These robots are made by Japanese technical college “KOSEN” (高専) students (15~20 years old) as the theme of the Robot Contest “KOSEN ROBOCON” (高専ロボコン) this year.
http://bit.ly/VtaTwI
Mother’s Day is 2 weeks away, which means we all have plenty of time to find that elusive thing that’s ‘just right’ for the mothering person in our lives. Whether your mom is a maker who needs just ooooone more item to complete the most recent WIP or is itching to take on something brand new, you’re in luck, dear friend – Adafruit’s here for you.
And what if your mom prefers showing/receiving admiration? Good news for you, it’s time to start makin’!
If your mom wants to learn CircuitPython we highly recommend this virtual gift! We’ve partnered with our friends at Codecademy to create a brand new course that will teach you CircuitPython to help you learn how to use your Circuit Playground Express — Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython — which is currently available on Codecademy.com for all Codecademy Pro subscribers.
By purchasing this code, you will receive 1 month of Codecademy Pro, which is 50% off the monthly price of $39.99. This offer is only eligible for new Codecademy users.
Hydro dipping is a fun, hands-on way of adding printed designs to any surface! This process can be done on any material that can hold the base coat and can be submerged into water. Works really well with any 3D printed project, but molded and cast parts also benefit. You’ve probably seen cool videos of motorcycle helmets and ceramic statues being dipped – when done right you can cover an entire shape with colorful ink. Read more
We’re maybe a little biased, but we think this is the best HackerBox ever – and not just because we partnered with HackerBoxes on this one to provide the ItsyBitsy M4.
Please note: HackerBoxes require soldering and other common hand tools to put together!
You’ll learn how to program embedded systems, cobble together a retro gaming platform with MakeCode Arcade, and more! Read more
Here at Adafruit we love discovering new and exotic glowing things. Like moths to the flame, we were intrigued by these fresh Flexible Silicone Neon-Like LED Strips! They look a lot like neon, but without the need for expensive transformers, glass tubing or inert gasses.
Super flexible and bendy, they feature a single-color non-addressable LED strip with a solid chunk of translucent silicone rubber as a diffuser. They look incredible, and super easy to use and are a great way to make your projects light up! Read more
Are you ready? Really ready? Cause here comes the Adafruit Grand Central featuring the Microchip ATSAMD51. This dev board is so big, it’s not named after a Metro train, it’s a whole freakin’ station! Read more
This board is like a freight train, with its 120MHz Cortex M4 with floating point support. Your code will zig and zag and zoom, and with a bunch of extra peripherals for support, this will for sure be your favorite new chipset.
The Grand Central is the first SAMD board that has enough pins to make it in the form of the Arduino Mega – with a massive number of pins, tons of analog inputs, dual DAC output, 8 MBytes of QSPI flash, SD card socket, and a NeoPixel. Read more
We’ve got our Circuit Playground friends on lunchboxes, posters, puzzle, enamel pins, PCB coasters, we can’t stop accessorizing with this maker-friendly motley crew friendly electronic pals.
Peep this super-special character lanyard designed by artist Bruce Yan. We dig the vibrant colors and handy double-hooks (perfect for toting around your HalloWing M0 Express!) It feels great, and very durable, so you can show it off at your next event and take your #BadgeLife to the next level. Read more
PyPortal, our easy-to-use IoT device that allows you to create all the things for the “Internet of Things” in minutes. Make custom touch screen interface GUIs, all open-source, and Python-powered using tinyJSON / APIs to get news, stock, weather, cat photos, and more – all over Wi-Fi with the latest technologies. Create little pocket universes of joy that connect to something good. Rotate it 90 degrees, it’s a web-connected conference badge #badgelife. Read more
Carry up to 29 tools anywhere you go with this travel friendly wearable multi-tool; the Leatherman Tread. This is the Black Steel version, we also have it in stainless steel. Read more
The NeoTrellis M4 is an all-in-one USB + NeoPixel + Elastomer + Audio board. It’s powered by our new favoritest-chip-in-the-world, the SAMD51, a Cortex M4 core running at 120 MHz. This chip has a speedy core with CircuitPython and Arduino support, hardware DSP/floating point, dual DACs (more on that later!) and all the goodies you expect from normal chips like I2C, ADC, DMA, etc. It has a roomy 512KB of flash and 192KB of SRAM so it’s great for CircuitPython, we added a full 8MB flash chip so tons of space for files and audio clips. Or you can load Arduino in for bonkers-fast audio processing/generation with our fork of the PJRC Audio library. Read more
Circuit Breaker Labs is a woman-owned, US-based company that recycles circuit boards from computers, calculators, phones, etc, to make stunning, one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry. We think this is a fantastic solution to the crippling e-waste problem, and we’re proud to carry smart jewelry that inspires dialogue in responsible recycling through art. Read more
A long time ago we made a Pi into a WiFi gateway that also blocked ads but the Pi Hole project does a way better job!
This kit will make your Pi Zero W act as a DNS (Domain Name Server) The kind of device that tells you that adafruit.com is known as IP address 104.20.38.240. Read more
Pickup a copy of Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA and then hit the ground running with everything that you need to become an Adafruit FLORA supreme being!
This pack is perfect for somebody interested in the wide world of wearable electronics and Adafruit’s tiny FLORA board. Read more
Know someone who loves electronics but doesn’t know the difference between an XBee, a soldering iron, and a SMA to uFL/u.FL/IPX/IPEX RF Adapter Cable? Want to buy the perfect gift but don’t know whether your Maker friend is a BeagleBone fan or a Rasp Pi devotee? Just a fan of Bruce Yan’s incredible design? If you’re any of these, or more, buy an Adafruit Gift Certificate – the perfect cyber-present for the electronics geek in your life. Check ’em all out here!
Buy a specific number of AdaBoxes up front. Starting with the next AdaBox installment we will ship one AdaBox directly to the gift recipient until the gift subscription is fulfilled.
$60/AdaBox
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Send an email to the recipient today, on a specific date that you choose, or print a custom gift certificate.
We like this guide for the mom who likes to party and doesn’t like making repeat purchases. Piñatas are tragic, beautiful creatures, used once in a carnival of destruction, then tossed out and forgotten. This guide demonstrates how to modify a piñata so that it can be filled and refilled with candy over and over again. This piñata also has an attitude, and can be programmed to respond, when hit, with sound effects or pre-recorded taunts. Read more
This guide feels like a great choice for a boss mom OR cosplaying mom! Construct a custom-fit harness bra with a unique array of NeoPixels and a Circuit Playground Express.
Caged clothing accessories can be worn over anything from a tank top to long sleeves. Harnesses come in all shapes and sizes and although they may accentuate certain body parts, they can be worn by anyone. Read more
For the coffee/tea loving Adventure Time fan justing starting out with electronics or looking for a project to work on with a beginner! In this project we’ll show you how to build a coffee cup lamp using an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express and Microsoft Makecode.
We’ll design our lamp out of a paper cup and use capacitive touch to change the colors of the LEDs! You can build your own capacitive touch pads using conductive tape. So get ready to go on an adventure and learn how to craft your own paper cup lamp! Read more
Oooh, for the mom who likes to be precise! How many grams of coffee did I add to my pour-over? Is the bag of cat food empty? Did I remember to water the plant? What’s the weight of these screws in my workshop?
To answer these questions (and more), you’re going to build an internet-enabled scale to track weight data over a period of time. To do this, you’ll be performing a bit of hardware hacking – tearing down a DYMO Postage scale and soldering wires to connect it to a PyPortal. Then, you’ll add some CircuitPython code to the PyPortal which allows you to read the the scale remotely using Adafruit IO – our easy-to-use internet of things service. Read more
This project’s for the mom always gazing toward the stars. A Particle Photon microcontroller and an Adafruit Neopixel ring combine to make a pin that’s fit for NASA fans. It displays an orbiting white blip when idle and then turns blue, white, red and multicolor when the ISS flies by. The code takes advantage of the Photon’s Wi-Fi capability and uses IFTTT (If This Then That), a free site that makes connecting IoT devices as easy as a few clicks. This project was inspired by my first NASA Space Apps Challenge project created with friend Brooks Zurn Rampersad–the ISS Orbit Skirt. That’s enough history…on to the parts! Read more
For the mom who likes to know the door was actually shut (and maybe also the mom who likes to make sure folks are respecting curfew/coming home straight from school ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Way cheaper than a guard dog who can use an iPhone, this project will show you how you can use an Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller board with a door sensor to email/tweet/text you when your door has opened!Read more
For the musical mom! You can build your own synthesizer using the NeoTrellis M4 with the PJRC Audio System Design Tool and Audio library for Arduino! In this guide you’ll learn how to patch together waveform oscillators, filters, envelopes, effects, and mixers. Then, you’ll learn how to control notes and parameters with the Trellis M4’s buttons and accelerometer. Soon you’ll be playing ripping synth leads, fat bass lines, and lush pads with a synthesizer of your own design! Read more and don’t miss these 3D Printed Bluetooth Controlled NeoPixel Headphones!
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
