Slashdot Mirror

Edison is an Intel creation aimed squarely at the maker and prototype markets. It's smaller than an Arduino, has built-in wi-fi, and is designed to be used in embedded applications. SparkFun is "an online retail store that sells the bits and pieces to make your electronics projects possible." They're partnering with Intel to sell the Edison and all kinds of add-ons for it. Open source? Sure. Right down to the schematics. David Stillman, star of today's video, works for SparkFun. He talks about "a gajillion" things you can do with an Edison, up to and including the creation of an image-recognition system for your next homemade drone. (Alternate Video Link)

An anonymous reader writes "The SparkFun team took a tour of a factory in China that manufactures LEDs. They took lots of pictures showing the parts that go into the LEDs, the machines used to build them, and the people operating the machines. There's a surprising amount of manual labor involved with making LEDs. Quoting: 'As shipped on the paper sheets, the LED dies are too close together to manipulate. There is a mechanical machine ... that spreads the dies out and sticks them to a film of weak adhesive. This film is suspended above the lead frames ... Using a microscope, the worker manually aligns the die, and, with a pair of tweezers, pokes the die down into the lead frame. The adhesive in the lead frame wins (is more sticky), and the worker quickly moves to the next die. We were told they can align over 80 per minute or about 40,000 per day.'"

Actually, I do RTFA writes "We recently heard about the confiscation of a delivery of multimeters to SparkFun for infringing on Fluke's trademark. One common thread in the discussions was the theme that Fluke should have let that shipment through as a goodwill gesture to SparkFun and the Maker community. Well, Fluke did one better. They announced they were sending more than $30k worth of official multimeters to SparkFun for them to do whatever they want with. SparkFun is most likely going to give them away. A great example of win-win-win?"

An anonymous reader points out a post at the blog of Sparkfun, a hobbyist electronics retailer. They recently received a letter from U.S. Customs saying a shipment of 2,000 multimeters was being barred from entry into the country. The reason? Trademark law. A company named Fluke holds a trademark on multimeters that have a 'contrasting yellow border.' Sparkfun's multimeters are a yellowish orange, but it was enough for Customs to stop the shipment. Returning the shipment is not an option because of import taxes in China, so the multimeters must now be destroyed. At $15 per item, it'll cost Sparkfun $30,000, plus the $150/hr fee for destroying them. Sparkfun had no idea about the trademark, and doesn't mind changing the color, but they say restrictions like these are a flaw in the trademark system. "Small business does not have the resources to stay abreast of all trademarks for all the products they don't carry. If you’re going to put the onus on the little guy to avoid infringing IP then you shouldn't need an army of consultants or attorneys to find this information."

An anonymous reader writes "Sparkfun has published their entire catalog of over 500 open hardware designs on Upverter. Anyone can now leverage Sparkfun's designs in their own projects by creating forks and customizing to their heart's desire."

Gibbs-Duhem writes "The LeafLabs Maple, an ARM device designed to be pin compatible with the Arduino, and with a strikingly similar and familiar development environment, has reached a new milestone — being carried by SparkFun. By swapping the popular 'avr-gcc' compiler with CodeSourcery's 'arm-non-eabi-gcc,' LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture. Also, while some Arduino shields are incompatible due to certain capabilities being allocated to different pins, several of them are currently supported and there are more to come."

moogied writes "SparkFun.com, a electronics component provider, has been sent a cease and desist letter by Sparc in response to the lengthy trademark process that SparkFun is participating in. The letter states 'Because the dominant portion of the SparkFun mark, namely, SPARK, is phonetically identical and nearly visually identical to SI's SPARC mark, and because it is used in connection with identical goods, we believe confusion is likely to occur among the relevant purchasing group.' SparkFun.com has provided the entire contents of the letter, with a breakdown of points it feels are most relevant."

mollyhackit writes "Here's a how-to guide for building a keyless entry that uses color identification instead of numbers. All eight buttons are initially blue; as you press the individual buttons they change color. Cycle the colors to your particular pattern, and you're in. This lock obviously wasn't designed for high security use since anyone in the same room would be able to see you and your amazing technicolor dream lock's pattern; it's just a fun project and will keep the youngins out of your workshop (timer prevents brute forcing). The RGB buttons are monome clones from hobby shop Sparkfun."

An anonymous reader writes "Is there any end to this ubiquitous computing thing? Plants that send thank you notes, player pianos that follow the dancer's movements, and umbrellas that warn you of upcoming rain are just a few of the uses of embedded computers described in this article from the NY Times. Laptops seem so dull when it's easy to embed chips, install a Linux distro and sew them into your clothes. Do we really need to wear our computers? Why can't the world be happy with a good old desktop? It was good enough for the PC generation."

hwestiii writes "Yet another indicator of how unrepresentative of the main Slashdot crowd I am (meaning 'old') is that, like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, and Pintos, I can remember when rotary dial phones were items of everyday use, and not some object of retro-cool pseudo-nostalgia. Imagine my delight, then at finding this project in which an old rotary phone is turned into a cell phone. To give credit where its due, I originally found it linked from Hack A Day. I know nothing about home-built electronics projects, but this is enough to make me want to learn. If this catches on, imagine what they'll have to do to those 'turn off your cell phone' messages that play in movie theatres."