For a long time it was unfortunately very expansive for our customers of the US and of Asia to order our products like the Fritzing Creator Kit. Now we’ve found a partner, who will fill the gap. We are very happy to welcome Seeed Studio as a reliable company selling our Kit.
Direkt Link to the Fritzing Creator Kit at Seeed Studio.
Howdy!
We thought we should delight our readers a little by showing some dainties of creative electronics. Yummy.
This week we want to start with the awesome Little Black Midi.
The Little Black Midi is a dress for singers and instrumentalists performing on stage. Equipped with copper plates, it will activate midi samples being played when the singer touches the plates with his/her copper ring. The dress enables the musician to combine singing, making music as well as dancing while being on stage.
The Little Black Midi was developed by Naomi Knopf while doing a class on musical interfaces held by Stefan Hermann in 2012/13 at the FH Potsdam.
Here you can see her performing a song with the dress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6yY9UieIcjM
The dress was realized with the Arduino software, a teensy, the Ableton programme and a lot of patience and trial and error. Congratulations on the dress, Naomi!
We have heard a lot about synthetic 3D printers for home use - now we are entering the home use metal age! A US startup wants to make metal printing available at a small cost and is presenting its project on Indiegogo, where you can get the MiniMetalMaker already from 500 $ on.
https://vimeo.com/78961565
The MiniMetalMaker prints 3D objects from digital files in metal clay, such as copper, bronze, steel, silver and gold but also ceramic and porcelain clays.
For now, the printable size is still quite small compared to the synthetic 3D printers: the object can have a size of max 6 cm x 6 cm x 6 cm. The extrusion trace is around 0.5mm. Nevertheless the team around founder David Hartkop states on their Indiegogo project page that with the monies raised this will be improved. This shouldn’t be a problem now as their campaign has currently raised already more than 15.000 $, which has been 1.5x their actual goal.
From now on you can get our Fritzing Creator Kits also at the Reichelt elektronik online store! Reichelt sells them in English language version as well as in German.
German Edition: www.reichelt.de English Edition: www.reichelt.de
Reichelt elektronik is one of the largest electronic distributors in Europe. A big plus is that you can order from Reichelt also in very small quantities without any disadvantage concerning the price - it will stay the same per item, whether you buy one or hundred.
Check it out!
Today, we got a visitor in the Fritzing Lab: Our neighbour, Charles Oleg, came by to show us his new creation. Charles is working on a project to bring more light into his flat by using a rotating mirror system.
This system includes, besides two mirrors to reflect the sunlight, also some planetary gears driven by a 1 to 10 Watt motor. The system knows its position via GPS signal as well as the current position of the sun and can move accordingly.
Charles showed us two of his planetary gear prototypes: one was laser-cutted and one was 3D-printed out of PLA.
He told us that those kinds of systems that track the position of the sun and move corresponding to it to receive as much sunlight as possible are currently used in solar parks as well as in telescopes. These are large projects with huge gear-wheels, whereas Charles aims at making his lighting system affordable and open source - so that everybody can use it.
Charles scripted the gear-wheels in python and has uploaded it on GitHub. So if you want to build your own solar light system, check out his blog or his GitHub folder.
Here you can find some more pictures of the gear-wheels.