Born out of a collaboration at famed Chicago hackerspace Pumping Station One, Board Forge is a six-person startup developing a prosumer-grade, open-source circuit board assembly robot. This weekend at SXSW Create, I got a chance to snap a few photos of their prototype version 1.0 while chatting with founder Jeff McAlvay about the democratization of industrial electronics assembly equipment.
So far the coolest thing I’ve seen at SXSW has been this clever early-stage prototype from our own Matt Richardson. It’s a “dynamic bike headlight” which can project your speed (and other useful information) onto the road surface in front of you. Matt showed off the proof-of-concept build, this morning, at Bike Hugger’s Built: Make & Tell event. Well done, Matt!
This afternoon, more than sixty hardware hackers, makers, movers, and shakers defied the drizzle to gather under a large tent at Autodesk’s SXSW Create pavillion for the official SXSW Hardware Startup Meetup. Organized and hosted by Ryan Brown and Bartley Gillan, the main event was a panel discussion and open Q&A with SF Hardware Startup Meetup organizer Nick Pinkston and the founders of four active hardware startups representing some 1.75M in pledged crowdfunding dollars among them.
At South By Southwest (SXSW), DIYROCKETS and Sunglass announced a new competition for an “Open Source 3D Printed Rocket Engine” that would be capable of sending nano-satellites into orbit. The competition starts today and runs through June.
MakerBot announced today it’s developing the Digitizer, a long-in-the-works desktop 3D scanner that will complement its line of 3D printers. MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis made the announcement at Austin’s SXSW Interactive.
