Make Extra: EL-Wire Blinky

A new Make Extra is up today: Mikey Sklar’s raving-mad recipe for building a blinking, glowing wearable with electroluminescent (EL) wire, a PIC microcontroller, and (optionally) a homemade PCB– all using exclusively open-source tools. The plans include full blinky control code that’s ready to compile and burn, or (of course) modify. Link.
New Roomba Scheduler! and you upgrade your current Roomba! The iRobot Scheduler is a complete scheduling system that can be used with any of our current Roomba products shown below. Simply program the days and times and Roomba will clean when you’re not at home, at night, once a week or anytime you want.


TiVo announced the winners for its HME Developer Challenge contest today. The grand prize winner is AudioFaucet (nee iSee iTunes) and its author Kyle Copeland, who will be receiving a Segway for his work. AudioFaucet provides control over iTunes for people streaming music using an Airport Express (or a really long audio cable) using TiVo’s Home Media Engine platform.
Voice over IP is taking over the world and I also like the idea of calling for free… The problem I’ve experienced so far is the fact that you always have to use those cumbersome headsets. When it would be possible to use your standard phone for this application, the experience of VoIP would be much more like the real POTS (plain old telephone system).