Hasta La Gadget!

Make your clothes stand out with these LED-equipped and 3D printed buttons. Electronics shop Adafruit shared this project last January to help keep folks visible in snowy winter nights, but unless it’s always bright and sunny where you are then you’ll still find a use for these buttons.

Aside from the 3D printed button cases, the main components of this device are the GEMMA electronic board and the Flora NeoPixel RGB LEDs. Watch the video to find out how to put them together.

As always you can find instructions and links to all components on Adafruit’s website. I’m sure you can make the electronics fit in other 3D printed cases, like a replica of Iron Man’s arc reactor.

Image by Noe & Pedro Ruiz

[via Adafruit via Gadgetify]

Our favorite hacker in the world, Ladyada AKA Limor Fried, spent a good few minutes talking to President Obama in one of his famous Fireside Hang-outs. The video, above, features Ladyada and her pink hair grilling the president on patent reform and STEM education.

It’s great that Makers like Fried are getting the attention of those in power. From Bre Pettis’ work with the America Makes initiative to the countless hardware companies working to redefine what it means to manufacture in the heartland, it’s important for makers to have a seat at the table. Builders will the be backbone of the coming post-Information Economy and I’m glad that Ladyada is speaking out in advance.

The best thing? Fried asks the President if his girls are into STEM and he says they’re still defining their interests but that it’s important that more women enter the tech fields. “We need to have more girls interested in math, science, and engineering. We have half the population that is way underrepresented in the schools,” he said.

via AdaFruit Blog

Ads can be a buzzkill, especially when they’re so pervasive they become distractions. Luckily, Adafruit has a new tutorial that turns your Raspbery Pi into a WiFi access point that doubles as a mighty ad-blocking machine for any device — be it an iPad or an Xbox — that connects to it. All you need is a working internet connection, a Raspberry Pi booting Raspbian, a WiFi adapter, an Ethernet cable and the necessary software (which the tutorial breaks down for you). It should go without saying, but Adafruit also includes a reminder to whitelist the ad-supported sites you frequently visit. Blocking ads might improve your online experience overall, but it’s always a good idea to support the people who provide you with free content. To get started, check out the tutorial at the source link below.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Source: Adafruit

We’re getting more and more excited watching the Expand NY agenda come together. We’ve already announced our first set of speakers (by which we mean people on stage, not those kind of speakers) including legendary game designer Peter Molyneux, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, io9 editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz and the man responsible for clogging the Internet’s tubes with funny cats: Ben Huh.

But wait, there’s more! Joining us at Javits Center this November will be:

• LeVar Burton, Actor, Director, Educator, co-founder of Reading Rainbow
• Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc.
• Becky Stern, Director of Wearable Electronics, Adafruit Industries
• Ben Heck, Master Modder on element14’s The Ben Heck Show

Filed under: Announcements, Meta

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It’s time to rethink the way our children learn. It’s all a bit overwhelming, attempting to restructure the age-old classroom model, particularly in a system as bogged down in bureaucratic red tape as education. This month, however, we packed up our things and toured the country to find out how educational institutions are adopting new models to help reinvent the learning process — rather than sitting idly by, waiting for the system to change around them. Naturally, technology is playing a huge role in that shift, moving from models of teaching to models of learning, where students can explore, express themselves and learn at their own speed.

We kick things off in Chicago, where Jackie Moore, a former systems programmer, is teaching inner city students how to build robots in a shopping mall basement at LevelUP. Next up, we head Miami and California, to see how technologies like the iPad, Google Chromebook and One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop are being implemented in three schools, including interviews with educators, students, OLPC CEO Rodrigo Halaby and Google director of product management, Rajen Sheth. We’ll also talk to component retailers SparkFun and Adafruit about the initiatives those companies have implemented to help kids learn electronics at an early age, and then we sit down with American Museum of Natural History president, Ellen Futter, to discuss the ways the New York City institution is redefining itself for the 21st century.

We’ve also got an interview with Ali Partovi, a serial entrepreneur, who is working to make computer science an essential part of the elementary-level STEM program, through Code.org. Richard Culatta, the acting director of the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology discusses how devices can help target the learning process for individual students and LeapFrog CEO John Barbour tells us how his company is rethinking the educational toy. All that plus prognostications from John Roderick and some really sweet moose dioramas can be yours to enjoy after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Laptops, Robots, Tablets, Science, Internet, Software, HD, Mobile, Alt, Google, Acer

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