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.

Hello World :-) Today, I want to introduce Laura and Johanna to you. Laura was born in Chicago and lived in San Francisco before she moved to Berlin last year. She is a creator / programmer / organizer who loves to ride bikes and talk a lot about them.

Johanna grew up between Madrid and Seattle, went through a Californian phase and has been living in Berlin since 2008. She spends a lot of her time outside, regardless of the weather.

From now on, the two will write on our blog about their experiences with creative electronics and we are very exited about their upcoming reports!

The MaketechXconference at Berlin’s Platoon Kunsthalle will take place from 8 – 9 of November 2013. It invites inspired thinkers, makers and developers to enter an intense, two-day conference of ambitious tinkering, lively discussions and hands-on innovation with smart tech, DIY development and plenty of focused ingenuity.

See the MaketechXlab – a mobile Fablab – to turn tentative ideas into tangible prototypes. Fritzing sponsored the electronic teaching material! «It’s high time to put humanity back in control of technology; so sign up to join our roster of key thinkers and passionate activists and help us realise simple – and simply inspired – solutions that promote positive change on any level!», so far the MakeTechX initiators.

A lot of interesting talks will be held and you can join ours on Friday, 12 o’clock. We will have a small hands on demonstration of the Fritzing Creator Kit on Friday, too. It will take place from 11 o’clock AM to 1 o’clock PM.

Hope to see you there :-)

At Fritzing, we are looking for a committed, reliable person to take over the day-to-day management of our online kit shop and production services.

We are selling the Fritzing Creator Kit: the kit helps anyone to learn to work creatively with electronics. You will be responsible for production of these kits (together with our wonderful team of packers), and fulfilling sales orders through our different sales channels.

We are also offering a simple, high-quality PCB manufacturing service together with our fabrication partners (Fritzing Fab). You will be responsible for the handling and shipping to our customers.

As we intend to extend these offerings and make Fritzing an even better service for the community, you can also play an instrumental role in crafting the strategy and implementing it.

We are looking for someone who speaks German and English and who has work experience in offline/online retail, small scale production or warehouse management. This is a full time position, though we can talk about other models.

Send your application to [email protected] and join our exciting team in a great location in Berlin-Kreuzberg!

Fritzing participated this year at the Open Hardware Summit for the first time! It was such a great event! We had the feeling everyone we knew, or once talked to or even heard of was there!

It was also so cool that the MIT hosted the event this year, the organisation was perfect and the venue very nice. The talks were very inspiring, but most of the exciting stuff and the interesting conversations happened in the corridor outside where the demos and posters were shown.

It’s so impressive to see how well people from the “scene” know each others, and how everyone shares very specific details on their designs and businesses so openly. In other industries this would be a well protected “trade secret” but not in here!

It was also very refreshing to have so many makers who want to go professional come to us and benefit from our experience in going from shipping 20 kits a month to more than a thousand. We showed on our poster the key elements of an ERP system and how to implement one. What to take care of and how to do it right.

We also had so many long time fritzing users pass by and give us some feedback.

We are still on the go in the US, expect a few follow-up posts in the next few days.