And we’re back with our sixteenth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter.
MadRat speculates about what the creators think of people making fire with Ikea products:
I always wonder what the owners, designers and factory workers think when they see their creations go from say a coffee table into an electric guitar or fire made without matches. Very interesting video, I’ve always wanted to be able to do that.
Mike Hord weighs in on the potential dangers of the IC squisher built from skate bearings, acrylic scraps:
I worry about this damaging parts with static electricity. You’re basically taking one plastic (the IC) and rubbing it over another plastic (the acrylic)- there WILL be a static charge built up. Whether it is to a damaging level or not, I can’t say- but MOS structures (such as those found in most modern microcontrollers, like the Atmel part in the pic) start to get antsy at a few hundred volts. Something like this moves from the human-body model to the charged device model- which usually increases susceptibility by a factor of 10. On your home bench, this may not be a problem- you have only yourself to hurt. If you’re going to be running dozens or hundreds of parts through this, and selling them, that’s a different story.
Tim is the proud owner of one of the parts featured in the triubute to kludges:
That’s my old 200 in one electronics board there! I had _so_ much fun with it! Ah the memories.
Chris Walker of Secret Labs responds to some criticism about the Netduino:
Good questions. Secret Labs LLC is a small private company so we don’t publish financials or such. But let me give you a few insights… To clear up the first question, Microsoft did not know about Netduino until I showed them the hardware a few months before launch. Secret Labs LLC does not have any outside investors (Microsoft or otherwise); we’re internally funded. Netduino is a project we started to try to bring open source hardware to a wider audience. While Netduino and Netduino Plus are nice “upgrade” boards, they’re also a great way for software developers to get into electronics. The money for the project came from our R&D budget. We were prototyping some other products using .NET Micro Framework and decided to build Netduino as a contribution to the open source community. Sales from Netduino will help pay for continuing enhancements to the open source codebase, the hardware, etc. As a company, we’ll continue investing in the open source platform and the community as well (similar to how Arduino LLC operates). As far as contributing to Arduino, I personally consider the Arduino LLC team members my friends…and we are working on at least two products for the Arduino community as well. With Netduino, the goal was to create a whole new generation of open source electronics–but we regularly recommend Arduinos as well. They’re great boards…and king in the 8-bit open source electronics world. I hope that helps clear things up a bit. “Secret Labs” is meant to be a clever name (think “skunkworks” or “batcave” or “why do we even have that lever?”). For our other projects, we work on really tough engineering problems–so the name makes sense there as well. Anyway, we love open source and we’re very excited to work with other open source companies (including Arduino LLC) and the existing community…in an effort to promote open source electronics. Let’s see how many new members we can welcome into the open source electronics world together… And thank you for your enthusiasm about open source electronics! Chris Secret Labs LLC
RocketGuy is impressed with the Robotic swarm over Switzerland:
Every facet of this project just has awesome just oozing out: Drones: Awesome Linux SBC: Awesome Aerial communications network: Awesome Flying wing: Awesome Evolution engineering: Awesome Switzerland: Awesome (both landscape, chocolate, and the LHC). I’m (very slowly) building a rather large single flying wing drone, but now I’m wondering about making smaller siblings for it…
DustynRobotics explains the reasoning behind the Water analogy illustrations:
I totally agree this isn’t a perfect analogy, and thanks for your suggestions! I scoured books and the internet for water analogy pictures that covered ALL these elements, and most either do capacitors OR everything else, not try to combine them. And now I know why! It’s tricky to get them all right in the same diagram. So this circuit isn’t meant to be practical, just to stick in people’s brains of what water analog components are to the electrical components.
On Facebook, Larry James was inspired by the Bronze-casting coins from 3d-printed parts:
man they look cool! and it goes to show that if you have an idea you shouldn’t sit on it too long or someone else will do it first… I’m even in a bronze casting foundry, just hadn’t gotten around to coins yet. will have to now… did I mention how cool they look… wow.
Also on Facebook, Jennifer Eagen didn’t fancy the DJ battle hoodies:
i think it’s creepy looking.
Jillian Strahler, however, was impressed:
you gotta see the video! this is MORE than an quirky knitting project. it is a fine piece of performance art combining craft, technology and sound manipulation (and video production!).
Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.
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