Hasta La Gadget!

Recognize this Baltimore building? Today, it’s the gleaming Baltimore Design School. But not long ago, it was an abandoned warehouse used by HBO for scenes of urban decay in The Wire. Talk about a comeback story.

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After the super slick Ex1 circuit board 3D printer, say hello to Circuit Scribe: another Kickstarter project aiming to make it easier to prototype electronics by doing away with breadboards and soldering. But this project is taking a deliberately low-tech (and thus low cost) approach – by putting conductive silver ink inside a rollerball pen so you can doodle circuit designs on the back of an envelope.

As well as being conductive (achieving a conductivity of 50-100 milliohms per square per mil), the ink inside the Circuit Scribe pen is water-based and non-toxic, so it’s safe for kids to use in schools – one of the main targets for the project, along with makers, life hackers & artists.

The pen’s U.S.-based creators also claim it scribbles all over the pen-based conductive ink competition – with the ink in their prototype Circuit Scribe pens flowing smoothly from the rollerball as you write, with no need for shaking or squeezing, and no hanging around waiting for lumpy ink traces to dry and accidentally smudging your circuit with your elbow.

Circuit Scribe’s makers are also putting together a selection of components that can be used with the pen to build fully fledged circuits – including basic stuff like LED boards, coin batteries, 9V battery connectors; to more advanced components aimed at makers, such as a potentiometers, RGB LEDs and photo sensors; to a $100 developer kit containing additional components such as a motor, DIY solder boards, DPDT switches and more, for people who want to use the Circuit Scribe in conjunction with tinkering around with boards such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

Components can be connected to the conductive ink circuits you’ve drawn on paper by putting a magnetic material behind the paper – or putting it on a refrigerator door – and then snapping the components directly onto the circuit.  

“You can build a circuit with nothing but a coin battery, paper clip, and LED, or build out complex circuits with multiple components,” the startup notes on their campaign page.

Unopened pens will have a shelf-life of about a year, while opened pens will “write smooth” for at least six months (provided you keep them capped and store away from heat sources and tip down when not in use). Each pen is good for 60-80m (262-328 ft) worth of lines, and the lines should keep their conductivity for “years”.

The startup is seeking $85,000 in crowdfunding to get Circuit Scribe to market. It’s already raised more than $22,000 with 40 days left to run. If the campaign hits its target, it’s aiming to ship the pens – and most of the component bundles – out to backers by June 2014.

Many students have trouble scrounging up money for loan payments, let alone cellular service. Thankfully, Sprint and Best Buy have teamed up on a promotional cellphone plan built for these non-existent budgets. The My Way promo adds a line with a year of free phone service to a parent’s existing account; customers just need to sign up at Best Buy and prove that Junior is going to school, whether it’s elementary or college. As you’d expect, though, there’s a big catch. While the plan includes unlimited calls and messaging, data is capped at 1GB per month unless you pay an extra $10 per month for unfettered internet access. Even so, it’s a potentially huge bargain for students who get in before the deal ends January 1st — they may finally have cash to spend on the finer things in life.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Sprint

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Source: Sprint

IBM’s Watson supercomputer is now open to the public. Well, sort of. The manufacturer this week announced that its cognitive computing system will very soon serve as a cloud-based development platform, helping programmers create software with its ‘cognitive computing intelligence.’

While software development has been around for a while now, it usually felt like a pretty specialized field as opposed to a topic that educational institutions felt should be taught to everyone. However times have changed and with technology becoming more integrated in our lives these days, perhaps teaching children programming as a skillset that can be used to earn money in the future does make sense. In fact we’ve seen several initiatives that aim to teach children how to program, and Play-i, a startup between former Google and Apple employees, is another educational tool that can be added to that ever-growing list.

Play-i is essentially a robot that will teach children how to program, and interestingly enough unlike some toys where children will eventually outgrow, the robot will scale its difficulty as the child gets older, or as they complete the different levels, so to speak. According to the company’s founder and CEO, Vikas Gupta, “The focus is on getting very young children to learn programming, and do it in a way that’s a lot of fun, and doesn’t feel challenging or intimidating to the point where they don’t meet their goals.” As to why they chose to use robots instead of an app or some other method, Gupta said, “All the research we’ve read shows that tangible products make those concepts of programming accessible to children in a very concrete way.”

It sounds like a great idea and Play-i has currently exceeded its funding goals by over 70%, so for more information on the device, hit up its website for the details. Play-i is expected to begin shipping in the summer of 2014.

The Play-i Robots Aims To Teach Children How To Program original content from Ubergizmo.