I met Emile Petrone, the raffish owner of gadget marketplace Tindie, a few weeks ago and he told me that I would like his site. It turns out I really do. Part maker community and part amazing e-shop, Tindie is where good handcrafted gadgets go to become businesses. It’s basically a cool place to find electronics projects for you and yours including sections for kids, musicians, and even fans of… Read More
Grado Labs appears to be a much bigger company than it is. Founded 60 years ago by Joseph Grado, the company made millions of phonograph cartridges in its long history and, during the rise of portable music, hit pay dirt by making some of the best-sounding headphones in the business. Where is this company located? In some massive office park in the depths of New Jersey? In a manufacturing town on… Read More
So what if Annette Gabbedey was born without fingers? What many would consider a disability clearly hasn’t hindered her ability to craft gorgeously intricate diamond- and opal-studded trinkets. In fact, she argues that it’s actually an advantage.
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Before Pac-Man, before Pong, before Space Invaders there was pinball. And it was good.
While we were in Las Vegas this week for CES 2014 we had the distinct pleasure of stopping by the Pinball Hall of Fame, an amazing space dedicated to all things electromechanical. I spoke with Tim Arnold, Director of Things And Stuff (or, alternately, Stuff And Things) who has made it his life’s mission to maintain some amazing amusements.
Arnold has a collection amassed over many years. He was – and still is – a trained Bally’s pinball technician and he has hundreds of machines in storage that he has amassed in fire sales back at the tail end of the pinball craze. He rebuilds many of the machines from scratch, using good parts from bad machines to make one uber machine that anyone can play in his nondescript museum.
Arnold has it all: Gottliebs, Ballys, Midways, and more. He has standup arcade games, as well, including amazing electromechanical games like Bally Road Runner, one of the first arcade games to use transistor controlled electronics. He also has a mini workshop in back where he repairs the old machines, keeping them in working condition even 60 years after they rolled off the factory floor.
There’s a lot of history – and a lot of fun – to be found in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Arnold is a tinkerer and a dedicated maker. He recommended that young makers learn to build things, not just mash things together. By being good with your hands, he said, you ensure your job and your skills are always in demand.
Visiting a place like the Pinball Hall of Fame makes you feel in touch with the long arc of history that led from the first bells and gears of the original pinball parlors to the ultra-realistic game machines of today. It’s mind-boggling to think that we moved from the pinball machine – essentially a glorified gas pump – to the arcade machine to the home console in a less than 20 years. Plus the games are really, really fun.
TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.
While the big companies got to show off their new products and inventions at CEATEC 2013, the 3rd and 4th of October were reserved for Japan’s innovative D.I.Y and maker enthusiasts.
The Maker movement itself originated and gained traction in the U.S., and 2006 saw the creation of a now annual event that describes itself as the “Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth”. A combination of D.I.Y, technology and family-friendly fun, the festival has become a space where everyone from tinkerers, hobbyists, artists, students and educators can come to both display their creativity as well as learn from others. In 2008, Tokyo-based makers created a local meetup called Make Tokyo: meeting, and were able to launch the first Tokyo Maker Faire in 2012 with the support of popular Maker magazine Makezine. This year’s Faire was held in both the Miraikan and the Time Building 24, and brought together 311 makers in total.
The event was split up into several areas, with the largest space holding a marketplace for people’s creations and the other areas offering both workshops, presentations and showcase spaces. The workshops available were mainly targeted towards kids, and included activities such as robot building with lego and musical instrument building.
Technology was heavily represented at the event. Several small hardware sellers presented various components and microcontrollers, such as the PocketDuino by Physicaloid, a small Arduino clone that you plug into your smartphone and enables you to program your Arduino from a distance, as well as save your work in a cloud library.
There were also displays that showcased hobbyist electronic projects, such as Saibaiman by Illmatic industries. Named after a Dragon Ball character, Saibaiman is a plant monitoring device dependent on social networks that uses the Raspberry Pi. Liking the plant’s page on Facebook, tweeting about it, or adding it as a friend will induce actions that help the to plant survive, such as watering the plant or turning on colored LEDs above it.
GR Sakura board, a Japanese-made competitor of the Raspberry Pi, was also used in a number of projects. Kurumin 2 by Kubota P for example, is an instrument that uses a motion censor and a GR sakura board, to modify the tone of notes.
The board was also used to create a cute luminous headband that changed colours according to the notes played on a smartphone based piano app.
Several other devices were based on sound or light such as ANIPOV’s luminous bycicle wheel or designer-engineer Taikan Hoshino and Ibi Hideki‘s drawing light script, “Spur of Words”. Spur of Words combines a phosphorescent paint, wireless light pen made with Arduino, and a program to change the written script.
Robots were also a big part of the show for example, Kougakuinndaigaku‘s Kinect sensor operated robot that replicates human movements.
BlockServo by @OTL created a very affordable motor made to build lego robots and compete with Lego’s own Mind Storm device.
Robi the Robot, is a kit produced by DeAGOSTINI that launched this year in February and enables you to build your very own robot friend.
Finally, several other interesting projects included the Tanuki’s swaying tail, which combined fashion and technology, Fab-Decchi’s Toaster Printer which prints simple shapes and characters onto bread, Looking Glass Factory‘s 3D block printing and Malt Factory’s unique take on the usage of receipt printers to create an interactive game.
We’ve talked about the growing number of Maker spaces being established, and the presence of a pretty well established culture of DIY in Japan in the past, and the diverse crowd at Maker Faire 2013 attests to the maker movement’s wide appeal here. From families, to young students and couples of all ages, there was definitely some evidence to suggest that the culture of making, tinkering and hacking with electronics and craft material is something that is being welcomed with open arms.
Deep in the wilds outside of Boston a team of mad scientists created the ultimate in robotic life: the iRobot Roomba, the ubiquitous, world-famous automatic vacuum that, for many of us, is our first brush with autonomous robotics. The Roomba’s brains came from a military minesweeper, its parts came from kids’ toys, and its mission – to clean up after us puny humans – came from a robotic floor waxer. In short, the Roomba is the culmination of years of research and is one of the most complex and coolest robots we’ve seen.
To mark the launch of the Roomba 800 series I took a walk down random access memory lane with Colin Angle, CEO and founder of iRobot. The affable, wry head of an international corporation lit up as he described the work that went into the Roomba and how the company solved the problem of hair tangling in the Roomba’s brushes. You have to see it to appreciate the dedication this guy has to sucking dirt off of your living room floor.
In this episode of TechCrunch Makers we discuss what it takes to build a cool new consumer product from the ground up and how hard it was to solve the age-old problem of dog hair. Enjoy!
Big things are coming for littleBits – the New York-based startup that makes lego-style electronics kits. The company, originally conceived by founder Ayah Bdeir in the MIT Media Lab (and backed in part by its head, Joi Ito), has already picked up traction for its first product: kits for children and hobbyists to create fun objects at home (see more in the video below). Today, it is announcing a Series B of $11.1 million to take that concept to the next level: building out a B2B platform for hardware innovation.
There are a number of science and tech partners already working with littleBits and its platform, although Bdeir says it will not be disclosing the names until next year, when the first products come out.
This latest round is being led by True Ventures and new investor Foundry Group, and it also includes new investors Two Sigma Ventures and Vegas Tech Fund (Zappos’ Tony Hseih’s fund); as well as Khosla Ventures, Mena Ventures, Neoteny Labs, O’Reilly AlphaTech, Lerer Ventures and other angel investors. Brad Feld of Foundry is also joining littleBits’ board. This brings the total raised by littleBits to over $15 million, including a $3.65 million Series A round; and $850,000 in seed funding. During the Series A announcement in June 2012, littleBits also struck a manufacturing and supply chain management deal with PCH International.
Moving to a B2B model from one targeting consumers was always on the cards, says Bdeir. “It was a part of the strategy ever since I raised the seed round.” It was a two step strategy: step one was inventing kits for kids/education “to lower the barrier for entry to make it easier to start with electronics as possible, and the platform is step two. It’s about raising the ceiling and putting the power in the hands of designers.”
That is because at its heart, Bdeir says littleBits “is a tool and platform for others to invent.” Focusing on B2B will help littleBits position itself as “a leading hardware innovation platform in the world that others can use to invent and make their products and designs.”
Interestingly, this is actually a part of a bigger trend we’re seeing in the hardware movement, to create products and platforms that help others realise their hardware visions. There is of course NYC neighbor Makerbot, and over in the UK, design agency Berg has launched Berg Cloud, a platform for those making connected devices – interestingly also a progression from a hardware product.
(In Berg’s case, it was their Little Printer project that inspired CEO Matt Webb and others at Berg to pivot the company. It’s also picked up a $1.3 million seed round from Connect Ventures, Initial Capital, and Index Ventures to realise their ambition of making it as easy to develop connected hardware as it is to develop for the web.)
LittleBits is not revealing any figures for how the electronics kids have sold (we have noted before that they are wonderful but are priced at a premium, with starter kits today costing just under $100). But Bdeir tells us that sales have quadrupled in the last year. In fact, part of the funding will be used to help make sure that the company can keep up with the demand its getting for the products – effectively that means more business development and sales people to close retail deals, and developers to continue making more things to add to the modular library to expand that offering. “The number of SKUs that we have is close to 80 and we have hundreds more on the way,” she says.
Back to the platform vision, the idea will be for new prototypes, and perhaps even products, to sit alongside those that are coming from littleBits itself. LittleBits will take a revenue share as part its business model. “We definitely want to support other businesses who want to start their own product lines,” she says. “A lot of game changers start in the hands of large companies these days, and then concepts get democratized and put in the hands of everyday people. But that is changing in areas like game development and manufacturing with the likes of Makerbot. We’re doing the same with electronics. It remains a very top down industry, but now we are bringing it into the hands of everyone.”
Below, a video of how littleBits’ kit works, and below that, a link to the company’s latest Synth Kit collaboration with Korg, which points to how third parties could work with the ‘platform.’
littleBits Synth Kit in collaboration with KORG from littleBits on Vimeo.
Here’s an hour-long super dive into the brains of two supremely interesting maker dudes. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that a conversation between MythBusters‘ Adam Savage and sculptor Tom Sachs goes down wonderful rabbit holes of geekdom rather quickly…
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What’s better than getting to attend a hands-on technology event with thousands of like-minded enthusiasts? How about attending two such shows for one low price?!
We’ve teamed up with our good friends at MAKE Magazine to make that a reality: now for $50 you can pick up a bundle ticket that gets you into both World Maker Faire in New York City on September 21st and 22nd (choose your day pass when purchasing the bundle), plus our own Expand NY on November 9th and 10th. That’s two amazing opportunities to see and interact with some of the most interesting projects and people in technology, from the next great inventors to the biggest names in consumer electronics.
Don’t miss it…
Filed under: Announcements, Meta
Magnets are pretty basic – some poles attract, some repel, and you can use them to hold stuff up on your fridge. However, what happens when magnets can be “programmed” to react in different ways? Huntsville, Ala.-based Correlated Magnetics Research has some magnets that can do some amazing – and slightly spooky – things.
These magnets can “hold together” while still not touching, release from each other with a twist, and even act as a sort of magnetic motor. In one cool demo Stephen Straus, VP of CMR, shows us magnets that repel each other from a certain distance and then, when pushed close enough, snap together. Before you run away screaming “perpetual motion machine,” understand that the laws of physics still apply.
CMR essentially programs the magnets as they’re built and the company creates magnetic solutions for companies around the world who need to control torque and movement but want to maintain an “air gap” between metals. Fortunately, they have a web store so we can try these things at home and attempt to build wild, non-intuitive magnetic interaction machines.
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