Entries Tagged makerfaire - O'Reilly Radar. The maker movement's potential for education, jobs and innovation is growing "MAKE" founder Dale Dougherty was named a "Champion of Change" by the White House. Dale Dougherty, one of the co-founders of O'Reilly Media, was honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change" for his work on "MAKE" Magazine, MakerFaire and the broader DIY movement. Jason Huggins' Angry Birds-playing Selenium robot How a game-playing robot could help shape the future of mobile testing. If you try to talk to Jason Huggins about Selenium, he'll probably do to you what he did to us. He'll bring his Arduino-based Angry Birds-playing testing robot to your interview and then he'll relate his invention to the larger problems of mobile application testing and cloud-based testing infrastructure. High voltage music: Behind the scenes with ArcAttack A look at the technology behind ArcAttack's Tesla coil music show.
The long slow make How will a "long, slow make" transform our society? Maker Faire Detroit this weekend. (Founder Stories) MakerBot’s Bre Pettis: “We Started With 3 Guys, A Laser Cutter, And A Dream” As Bre Pettis continues his conversation with Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon, the two discuss the challenges of running a business that literally requires nuts and bolts assembly. In this situation, scaling brings a whole new set of challenges unfamiliar to many software start-ups.
Hardware is just a different game. For example, as Pettis tells it, “we ran out of motors, we bought all of them in the world, we went to buy more and they were like you’ve got them all. And so we had to figure out how to like get motors manufactured and custom made for us. So in terms of hardware that’s kind of been a bunch of the challenges.” Dixon admits, sometimes it is “hard for us software people to grok how different it is.” (Disclosure: Dixon is an investor in Makerbot through Founder Collective).
And when the times get tough, the tough go to China. Below, Pettis talks about how Makerbot got off the ground. Make sure to watch Part I here and past Founder Stories episodes here. Open design comes of age, first of a series by Massimo Menichinelli. Massimo Menichinelli (original source here): With this post (and two following ones) I’m going to explain why I think that Open Design is going mainstream now (here I’m talking about Open Design on broad terms). With these posts I don’t want to say that it is now considered popular and no more controversial, but that it is not underground anymore: it is now finding its place inside the collective imagination.
Since I started researching Open and Collaborative Design practices in 2005, things have changed a lot: there are no more isolated projects but a whole ecosystem is emerging through the weaving of collaborative networks. And since the past year, few signs have been showing clearly that more and more institutional or famous organizations and people are interested in Open Design (or at least in bringing collaboration and crowdsourcing in the design process).
If it’s not really mainstream yet, it’s not underground anymore for sure. 01. 02. 02.01 OpenIDEO.com 02.02 frogMob. The secret is to bang the rocks together. “We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” — “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. It started off as a project to give artists access to embedded micro-processors for interaction design projects, but I think it’s going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap, prototyping for embedded systems. The Arduino UNO. The Arduino, and the open hardware movement that has grown up with it, and at least to certain extent around it, is enabling a generation of high-tech tinkerers both to break the seals on proprietary technology, and prototype new ideas with fairly minimal hardware knowledge.
Goodbye desktop The underlying trend is clear. The humble Arduino is the start of that. 2 makers, 2 robots, 2 visions. If you haven’t been to a Maker Faire, it can be hard to describe the vast and diverse array of exhibitors and events, and no set of interviews can do the event itself justice. But recent conversations with makers Scott Bergquist and Ian Bernstein do offer a decent representation of what Maker Faire is fundamentally about. What follows are the stories of two very different robots, both of which will be in attendance (in some form) at the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area. The errand bot Bergquist will be showing the Driverless Errand Car, a design concept for an autonomous vehicle system that delivers goods and runs errands.
Bergquist admits that his idea is well ahead of the technologies required, but he wants people to start thinking about how society could benefit if fuel-efficient robotic vehicles were running errands without requiring human interaction. As he likes to put it, “Why drive a 4,000-pound vehicle to get a quarter-pounder at McDonalds?” A basic ball with complicated guts.