Maker Faire 2018 on Bald Engineer

Maker Faire 2018, Bald Engineer's Highlights

Wed, 23 May 2018 18:54:34 +0000

The Bay Area’s Maker Faire 2018 encompasses an impressive scope of activities. Pedal-powered live music, fire-breathing machines, kids building stuff, corn dogs, fresh honey, LEDs, soldering, roaming robots, and so much more. The last couple of days I made a few posts on the things I saw at Maker Faire. In this post, I’ll summarize many things that don’t fit together, but I wanted to mention that I enjoyed seeing.

Bay Area Maker Faire 2018 Photo Gallery

Wed, 23 May 2018 17:57:41 +0000

With the Bay Area Maker Faire over, I’m wrapping up my coverage with a photo gallery of my favorites. Some of these have been covered in my other Maker Faire 2018 posts. So check those out for details. FYI. Some of the products in this gallery will be covered in future posts. Maker Faire 2018

5 Unexpected Brands at Maker Faire 2018

Tue, 22 May 2018 19:51:28 +0000

Maker Faire, like any festival, is a combination of passion products, startups, and larger companies generating awareness. As I walked around, I noticed many logos and brands. An obvious one to see is Make Magazine. Another I saw that made sense is Digi-Key’s maker.io. They had a strong showing, along with the Arduino booth. But that one is expected since so many projects, not just electronics, have an Arduino in them. That said, there were five brands that I did not expect to see at Maker Faire (and most had something interesting to show.)

Arduino Uno WiFi Rev 2 Features I noticed

Tue, 22 May 2018 02:10:34 +0000

Arduino announced several new products at the 2018 Bay Area Maker Faire. One of those products is the Uno WiFi Rev 2. (Check out this post for an introduction to the MKR Vidor 4000, an FPGA-based board. You can read their official announcement here. This new Uno board represents a significant upgrade for the 8-bit family of Arduino boards. However, I do have a few reservations. Arduino Uno WiFi Rev 2 Starting off, I am not happy with the name. It is too long. For that reason, I am going to keep using the full name in this post to demonstrate why I don’t like it. Another reason I’m grumpy it that new microprocessor makes it incompatible with 328p code. That said,sketches (and libraries) using only the Arduino library will (likely) work fine. Anything that uses registers, like direct port manipulation, will have issues. Just like moving to any other architecture supported by the IDE. However, because it has the name “Uno,” many users will be tripped up by incompatibilities.

MKR Vidor 4000 brings FPGA to Makers

Mon, 21 May 2018 21:44:26 +0000

Arduino announced several new products at the 2018 Bay Area Maker Faire. One of those products is the MKR Vidor 4000, an FPGA-based board. You can read their official announcement here. (Over here is a write-up on the new Uno WiFi Rev 2.) The goal of the MKR Vidor is to make FPGA accessible to makers and innovators. It represents a new shift in hardware focus for the Arduino team. An FPGA is a Field Programmable Gate Array. In other words, it is reconfigurable hardware. Unlike a microcontroller, an FPGA is not running software. Instead, its gate array changes configurations for a specific task.