Artist’s Rendering of the Electric Vehicle Couch.
Maximum Speed: 10 Mile Per Hour.
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Kickstarter: Gameduino
The most interesting Kickstarter project I’ve come across recently has to be Gameduino:
Gameduino connects your Arduino to a VGA monitor and speakers, so anyone who can write an Arduino sketch can create video games. It’s packed full of 8-bit game goodness: hundreds of sprites, smooth scrolling, multi-channel stereo sound.
James Bowman was hoping to raise $3,333 to do a manufacturing run of the Gameduino, but with the deadline tomorrow, it’s now at $35,253 raised. Amazing!
I also think the pledge levels were chosen wisely…
$3 or more gets you a zip file containing all the raw video and audio.
$53 or more gets you a Gameduino from the production run, assembled and tested.
$113 or more gets you a Gameduino, a printed reference poster, a joystick, and an Arduino Uno, preloaded with the Asteroids game.
$263 or more gets you all of the above, plus your 64-byte message burned into an easter-egg section of every Gameduino’s boot ROM. (8 of these were available.)
$433 or more gets you all of the above, plus the Arduino preloaded with a game of your devising. Just supply the graphics, describe gameplay, and I’ll have a weekend hackathon to put it on the Gameduino. (4 of these available.)
At the base, you can toss $3 towards the effort, just to show your support and help make things happen. For $53 you get an actual Gameduino from the production run. One would hope that they do more production runs, based on the money raised, I’d say that’s a sure bet. But will it cost more or less than $53 next time? If you don’t want to risk it costing more, or you just want to be one of the first to have one, this is a great option.
And for the people who really want to support the project, there were 12 higher-end support options, 4 of which get you custom game development. (All of them sold out.)
Also worth noting: The Gameduino is open-source hardware (BSD license) and all its code is GPL licensed. Nice! This means that once it’s created, others should be able to build and sell them as well. I’d expect kits to appear in the future.
Check out the Gameduino project page for a sweet video showing it’s capabilities, and if you want one, hurry up and pledge today!
Join us Saturday, April 9th, 2011 at the Milwaukee Makerspace for the Grand Opening & Mini Maker Fair!
I’ll be there showing off some of my recent projects for the Mini Maker Fair, so if you’ve ever wanted some hands-on with the stuff you’ve seen on my blog, well, this is your chance.
You can visit milwaukeemakerspace.org for more info (and I hear they are close to launching a redesign) or you can follow them on the Twitters at @mkemakerspace.
You can RSVP on Facebook (and see who else is going) or just show up… I hope to see you there!
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Pirate Eggs!
Since Egg-Bot is now fully-functional, I figured it was time to start making some SVGs of my own and doing some plotting…
Well, maybe “of my own” is stretching it a bit… The first one I started with was actually this jolly roger image, which I ran through the Voronoi Stippler, and then imported into Inkscape.
The plot took about an hour, which is probably way too long, as I could tell Egg-Bot was working it’s little motors out… Next time I’ll need to simplify things a bit when I create the stippling.
I’ll also be working on converting existing EPS images/logos to SVG files that are suitable for the Egg-Bot (and once I do, I’ll post them to Thingiverse.) For now, just keep an eye out for more egg-plotting fun right here.
(Note: For some reason Adrian Secord has removed the download link for VoronoiStippler.app, and his personal site stippling.org, does not resolve for me…)
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Photo… Published!
If you pick up the April 2011 issue of Milwaukee Magazine, and flip to page 60, you’ll see one of my photos.
Neat!
It’s neat, but it’s also weird for me. You see, I interned at Milwaukee Magazine in 1993, and ended up working for QuadCreative (and while at QC I also did work for Milwaukee Magazine, in fact I’m pretty sure I built the first web sites for both organizations.)
So anyway, in the process of working at QuadCreative I met Cory Zimmermann, who is part of Z2 Marketing and Z2 Photo, and one of the big reasons I know what I do about photography.
To clarify, this isn’t some inside job… The person at Milwaukee Magazine had no idea who I was, and it was just a coincidence that I once worked there (I left in 2000) and just happened to stumble across the photo on Flickr and thought it would work for the article.
I don’t know if it’s becoming less cool to see your work in print now that (almost) everything is digital, but hey, I come from the publishing world (of paper!) and I still think it’s cool to see an actual printed magazine with one of my photos in it.