Science Projects

Check out phone charger by Lisa Earley a short 6 second film for the Adafruit #adafruit6secs electronic film festival (Youtube playlist here for all the entries on YouTube). Featured Adafruit Products MintyBoost Kit – v3.0 – Make your own iPod/iPhone/GPS/etc… battery-pack and recharger! This project includes all the electronic parts necessary to build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge. If you have a Nintendo DS/GBA or a PSP you can buy charger cables from us, too. (read more)

Onion Pi Pack w/Small Antenna – Make a Raspberry Pi Tor Proxy. Feel like someone is snooping on you? Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. Using this pack of parts and a free weekend you can build a project that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi. After it’s built, using it is easy-as-pie. First, plug the Ethernet cable into any Internet provider in your home, work, hotel or conference/event. Next, power up the Pi with the micro USB cable to your laptop or to the wall adapter. The Pi will boot up and create a new secure wireless access point called Onion Pi. Connecting to that access point will automatically route any web browsing from your computer through the anonymizing Tor network. This pack comes with everything you need, $100 of parts for $90 and we’ll donate a portion of each sale to the Tor foundation! Each order comes with: Raspberry Pi Model B – has an Ethernet port, two USB ports and 512 MB of RAM Adafruit Pi Case – Keeps your Pi cozy and safe Mini WiFi adapter – Good range, and a compact design, this will be how you connect to the Pi proxy 10 foot Ethernet cable – connect this from your Pi to a router with Internet service MicroUSB cable – 3 feet long, great for powering your Pi 5V 1A power adapter – specially designed for the Pi USB console cable – good for debugging and setting up your Pi when running it without a monitor/keyboard 4 GB SD Card with Wheezy – a 4GB card with Raspbian 7 already installed. The Onion Pi logo shown above for display only, it’s not a sticker or included. You’ll still need to set up the access point and Tor software according to our tutorial. This project is best used by people with a little bit of command-line, linux or Raspberry Pi experience. If you’ve set up a Raspberry Pi and configured it before, this project will be a fun experience. We have tons of tutorials for exploring Raspberry Pi in the Adafruit Learning System Please note! This is a new project and there may be updates and improvements over time! In stock and shipping!

Hunting for an E.T. Castoff in a Most Terrestrial Place @ NYTimes.com. You are the world’s greatest video game maker, but suddenly you find yourself stuck with millions of cartridges of a game nobody wants. What do you do? You load the cartridges into trucks and bury them in the New Mexico desert. Atari did just that almost 30 years ago, or so the story goes. The truth lies beneath packed dirt and poured concrete in a sleeping landfill by the railroad tracks behind a McDonald’s here, where this city of about 32,000, home to an Air Force base and the state’s Museum of Space History, dumped its garbage many years ago. A spray-painted sign, bright orange against a white background, warns visitors: “Keep Out.” The place may be the final resting place for the video game E.T., recalled by some as one of the worst video games ever made.

Adafruit COO Molly Thorkelson spoke on a panel today at the CityAge Global Metropolis conference called “the startup metropolis:how to catelyze the next generation of companies.”

A handful of 3D printed parts, some brushless motors, and a bit of control hardware add a flair of cinematography to this quadcopter. [Sean] sent in a tip about his work after seeing yesterday’s feature of a brushless gimbal being used to improve image stability with a shoulder mounted camera. That rig was designed to be used with a quadcopter, and this hacks shows why. It’s obvious from the demo footage that the gimbal — which is mounted directly to the frame of the TBS Discovery quadcopter — does a great job of keeping the image steady. The panning and tilting in directions contrary to the physics of flight make for a much more interesting video experience. Watch the inset video which is a live feed from the aircraft to the pilot. As the quadcopter makes very sharp banking turns you wouldn’t even be able to tell the pitch or roll have changed in the HQ version. You can see a pair of images detailing the 3D printed parts and the assembled gimbal below. Filed under: news

McMaster-Carr app via EMSL. McMaster-Carr is the complete source for everything in your plant. Order over 510,000 products from the palm of your hand.

The 2013 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation was held early in May. Here’s a video montage of several robots shown off at the event. Looks like it would have been a blast to attend, but at least you can draw some inspiration from such a wide range of examples. We grabbed a half-dozen screenshots that caught our eye. Moving from the top left in clockwise fashion we have a segmented worm bot that uses rollers for locomotion. There’s an interesting game of catch going on in the lobby with this sphere-footed self balancer. Who would have thought about using wire beaters as wheels? Probably the team that developed the tripod in the upper right. Just below there’s one of the many flying entries, a robot with what looks like a pair of propellers at its center. The rover in the middle is showing off the 3D topography map it creates to find its way. And finally, someone set up a pool of water for this snake to swim around in. [Thanks Michael] Filed under: cons, robots hacks, roundup

Switch Science – Japan. TechShare – Japan. These are just 2 of our distributors in the Asia region, make sure to visit the Adafruit distributor page to view all! We will be spotlighting Adafruit resellers from around the world on a regular basis! We recently updated our distributor, reseller and hackerspace pricing! Now, 1 quantity has UP TO a 30% discount off many items, this is allows you to get a great discount by just ordering 1 of something. Great for folks who just want to try 1 item of each of something out in their store, etc. As always, once you order 50+ or more of something the discount goes UP TO 40% off many items as well. Note! *Not ALL items have reseller pricing, reseller pricing is for items we can discount for our resellers. We are adding more all the time! Remember, the minimum order is $250 per order, not including shipping. We have a very easy reseller program and would love to have more great people & companies as a distributors/resellers/hackerspaces. Our products are high-quality and we think they’re the best engineered & designed in the market. How can you be a distributor? Just fill our form here, keep in mind the following questions! Are you an online store, a physical store or a hackerspace that would like to distribute our products? Please include a link. Can you place orders $250 and over (Not including shipping) each time? Can you pay via paypal or credit card? For international large orders, can you pay via wire transfer? Do you have a UPS account? (This is not required, but helpful). We’ll be adding more features for resellers in 2013 enjoy! To become a distributor, click here.

Not only does McMaster-Carr have the one of best print catalogs and the best online shopping experience, they now have an iPad app, too. (via @edrabbit)

Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown. Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond! 1943 – Bus Helicopters Proposed On June 14, 1943 Greyhound Bus first proposed launching helicopter buses for commercial use in an application filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). Designers Raymond Loewy and Igor Sikorsky created the concept design for a 14 seat craft. Though scale models of the buses and terminals were built, no actual helicopter bus was ever built. The proposed venture was publicized in the New York Times on September 9, 1945, but because seemed impossible to make profitable, the airbus helicopter project was eventually abandoned. A publicity article by Sikorsky campaigning for the use of helicopters can be found in this article in the Atlantic. 1928 – First Female Solo Flight It has been eighty-five years today since Amelia Earhart completed the first female piloted solo trip across the Atlantic. 1884 – Telecomunications Go Underground New York the day after the blizzard of 1888 blew out power across the city One hundred twenty nine years ago last Friday, New York became the first state to enact legislation requiring that all cities with a population larger than 500,000 bury “all telegraph, telephonic and electric light wires and cables wires,” ensuring that our city streets don’t look like this the view above.   The law was simply ignored by most electricity and telephone companies, who privately owned the wires and poles supporting them, until the Blizzard of 1888 took out power to the city and government began enforcing the law.  For more information, read here. What happens when large quantities of snow fall on wires.