Researchers at the Polytechnic School of Montreal have figured out a way to turn a battery into a flexible material. Each strand of the “battery” is 0.6V. While exciting, it has one major drawback before commercialization: it isn’t waterproof yet.
How to: Weave a flexible battery into fabric material – Electronic Products.
Tools like National’s (now TI) WebBENCH have allowed engineers to design power supplies without downloading any software for quite some time. Recently I got an account at Upverter.com. This web application is focused schematic capture with social sharing.
Just announced this week, Digi-Key is looking to enter this area with their new web based tool to share schematics, Scheme-It(sm).
I haven’t had a chance to put it through its paces yet, but I look forward to comparing to Upverter and Eagle version 6 soon.
Open Source Hardware (OSH) means not only releasing devices, but all of the documentation associated with them. For some projects, this may include the actual CAD files used to produce the device. For example, the Arduino team produces not only schematics but the Eagle PCB CAD files for each of their boards. The great thing about such disclosure is that one can easily tweak the existing design for their own purposes. The downside is that nearly anyone can submit the exact same files to their own production house and have immediate clones.
Even when some people choose to do this, as have some eBay (and now Amazon) sellers, differences crop up from “real” boards and the clones (aka “fakes”). Click on the above photo for a Flickr-based “spot the differences” game!
What is more American than an Apple Pie? Why, a Pie designed in California, made in China. This is one pie I’d like to jailbreak. Is applying too much heat to this pie considered an upgrade? Okay, that’s all the lame puns I have for this laser cut pie.
Evil Mad Scientist Labratories provides a tutorial on how to bake a Mac Mini Style Apple pie, complete with Laser Cutting Instructions. Yeah that’s right, a laser cut pie.
Even knowing that the name Arduino was rooted in Italian, I have often wondered what it meant. David Kushner of IEEE Spectrum has a great write-up on the beginnings of the Arduino project.
Great read. The most surprising thing to me is that over 250,000 official boards have sold since 2005. That isn’t counting clones and stand alones. Wow!
