One of the limitations of 3D printing is in the materials—plastic might be the most affordable and widely available, but it’s also cheap and brittle. So some students at Michigan Tech University have made a relatively cheap metal 3D printer, and they’re releasing the plans to the masses.
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This article was written on October 02, 2009 by CyberNet.
I’m not sure how many of you have decided to take part in the Monopoly City Streets game, but one of my friends pointed out something interesting. The game was promoted as being powered by Google Maps, but looking into the FAQ’s reveals that the data is not solely coming from Google. Instead the maps that you see are coming from Google, but the data that is actually being used in the backend is from a site called OpenStreetMap. Google Maps is pretty much used just for the “eye candy” and nothing else. This makes things a bit interesting:
Monopoly City Streets launched in September 2009 using map images from Google Maps and map data from OpenStreetMap for the streets that you can buy. You may have noticed that the streets on the map do not exactly fit the (blue/purple/red) street overlays, or that the spelling of the name of a street is different, or that you cannot buy a street at all. All that is because the street data comes from OpenStreetMap, but the map images do not.
I hadn’t heard of OpenStreetMap before, but after looking into it I have to say that it’s a rather cool idea. It’s basically a Wikipedia for maps. Anyone is free to update the content, which means if your street isn’t on the map you are free to add it. It does require that you collect and upload some data though.
What’s the purpose of OpenStreetMap with services like Google Maps? This isn’t designed to be a site that you can get directions from. Instead it’s geared towards developers. It’s a free source for developers to get map data from without having to worry about any kind of licensing:
The goal of the project is to have free-as-in-free-speech geographical data for everyone to use, for any purpose. Anybody can download a copy of all of OpenStreetMap’s database and do anything they like with it.
Kinda neat. There’s a good chance that from a user’s perspective you’ll never hear of this service again, but don’t be surprised to find out that some of the apps you use are getting their data from this site. One good example that I found is CloudMade, who lets you apply or create your own visual styles and color schemes for the maps. There’s other OpenStreetMap-powered solutions as well, such as MapMe or the iPhone app called OffMaps that is designed to take your maps offline. Developers are definitely using it, and it will be interesting to see if the “open” nature of the site will contribute or hinder its success. After all, one day you might wake up and your street will cease to exist (on the map that is). 🙂
OpenStreetMap Homepage
Thanks Pete!
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
In the late 1980s a select group of British teens were given (or saved up their pocket money to buy) a small, rubber-keyed home PC called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My brother was one of them. And that little box, with its blank canvas start screen that prompted you to try out a few lines of code (Spectrum Basic), set him on the road to becoming a fully fledged programmer.
Fast forward to today, and the machines kids get to play with – the iPads and iPod Touches – don’t actively encouraging that sort of computing. They’re slick, sealed boxes, with UIs that deliberately conceal complexity so they can wow with effortless capability. They’re designed to please (to ‘delight’ in Applespeak), not to make you curious. And that’s an important difference.
The disconnect between the creative platforms of the past, and the slick, hermetically sealed boxes of today was the trigger for the U.K.-made Raspberry Pi microcomputer to be created by a group of Cambridge engineers. And just yesterday the Pi Foundation announced it has shipped its two millionth board.
It’s also the impetus behind a new platform, part-inspired by and built on top of the Pi, called Kano (pictured above, and in kit form below). What exactly is Kano? It’s a build-it-yourself computer launching today on Kickstarter with the aim of pulling in $100,000 in crowdbacking to get 1,000 of its Kano kits to market by summer 2014.
The kits are the whole computing kit & kaboodle: an “end-to-end computer”, costing $99, which deliberately arrives in pieces so the curious can put it together, helped along by Kano’s easy to understand guidebooks, and then use the machine they’ve assembled to start sticking bits of code together and building virtual stuff.
“The initial idea was let’s create a simple, fun, step-by-step computer kit that anyone can use to bring a computer to life and start hacking up games, and start really feeling that sense of possibility… rather than intimidation,” co-founder Alex Klein tells TechCrunch.
“The original inspiration was my seven-year-old cousin, Micah, trying to set up a computer and trying to make the Raspberry Pi – and finding that the For Dummies guide was 400 pages long in this little tiny font, and saying ‘what do we do now?’.”
Kano’s founders decided there had to be a more user-friendly way to get kids cutting their coding teeth and so they came up with the idea of combining a DIY computer kit with easy to read guidebooks and plug-and-play coding software. The basic idea is to add an accessibility layer on top of the Raspberry Pi to lower the barrier to entry for hacking around with an open computing platform (even as it ups the cost a little).
The hardware heart of Kano is the Raspberry Pi microcomputer but unlike when you order a Pi, Kano comes with all the bits and bobs needed to turn the board into a programmable computer, namely: “Keyboard, SD card, makeable casing, case mods, an operating system, tons of games and levels, a DIY speaker, and Level books with dozens of hours of projects”.
Kano is not just repackaging Pi hardware; it’s also building its own software to go with it, including an operating system, Kano OS – built on top of Debian Linux (using the Debian Wheezy distro) – and a Scratch-esque visual coding environment called Kano Blocks that will let the user plug and play with graphical blocks to pull together lines of code.
This plug-and-play, trial-and-error software learning environment will also allow them to see lines of code being generated as they stick various components together, and view the resulting program in action.
Here’s a couple of videos of Kano Blocks in (sped up) action – showing how you can hack together a game of Pong, and generate massive Minecraft constructions:
“Kano OS is still a work in progress. We’re pre-alpha, and we’re hoping that our Kickstarter backers will get the alpha release, and they’ll get to test it. But we’re really excited about Kano OS because it’s based on Debian Linux… but it provides not only a front end experience that is more intuitive, more familiar to a generation raised on mobile and console games,” says Alex.
“At the same time we’ve done amazing stuff on the back end as well. So we’ve fixed dozens of known issues with Linux and the Raspberry Pi. We’ve done a seamless wireless auto configuration. We’ve made sure that the image is lean – less than 1GB. The image auto-expands to the partition so that you don’t have to worry about plugging it into your computer, burning an image.”
The original idea for the Raspberry Pi was to get more U.K. kids coding, but it’s fair to say that adoption has been strongest among the already tech savvy maker/hacker community. Likely because Pi is deliberately difficult – so if you’re an absolute beginner there’s a big hurdle to overcome to start being able to use it.
The Pi Foundation wanted a certain degree of difficulty so that users would have to stretch themselves to explore and figure stuff out. But they set the bar pretty high – which means there’s room for more accessible platforms, such as Kano, to sit on top of Pi and make it even easier to play with.
“In terms of Raspberry Pi, we love working with the board, and we share the same social goals as the Foundation,” says Alex. “And we really want to get as many of these kits out there as possible – the more Raspberry Pis and the more Kano kits out there in the wild, we think, the more kids are going to get excited about technology, instead of just consuming, consuming, consuming. Flipping through Instagram, downloading Angry Birds… I don’t mean to disparage any of these companies or products, because they’re brilliant, and it’s not as if our cell phones are broken; they’re magical. We need them.
“But at the same time if we have in our right hand the iPhone – a powerful device for consuming media, for communicating, and for any of the things these wonderful, closed, hermetically sealed screens can do – and then in our left hand we have something that is our own; that takes nothing for granted, that builds you up and makes you feel confident in altering technology – rather than just using it.”
“The example of Raspberry Pi shows, pretty unambiguously, there is a hunger for a kind of control and accessibility to computing that people didn’t really expect,” he adds.
Asked about Kano, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton told TechCrunch: “I think there’s value to platforms like Kano (Fuze would be another great example) which add some combination of hardware, software, peripherals and documentation to the Pi to make it more appealing to particular groups of users who are underserved by the standard offering.
“I’ve seen early versions of the Kano software environment, and I think Alex and the team are doing great work making the Pi more accessible to a younger audience.”
Upton also suggested the Pi Foundation has plans to move in this direction itself, in future. “Over time, Raspberry Pi will likely move in the direction of a more consumer-friendly offering, but there will always be a space for this sort of value-added offering,” he added.
Another difference of emphasis between Kano and Raspberry Pi is that Kano is starting with the idea of serving a global and emerging market need, rather than fixing a local developed world problem. Of course, although Pi started as a U.K. project, it quickly branched out beyond that – as hacker/maker community adoption generated broader momentum.
But Kano is hoping to target a broader geographical base right from the start, with English, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin versions of its kit’s guidebooks planned in time for launch. It’s also working on adding more languages, including Hindi, says Alex.
“The computing platforms of the future are going to be shaped by the computing populous of the future and those people are predominantly going to live in places like Johannesburg and Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Delhi and Pune, and those people, we think – and if you look at the data it seems to bear out – that they’re looking for things that are affordable, hackable and open source. Free software that they can modify,” he adds.
“So there’s a huge untapped need. All you really need to do is add a layer of simplicity, fun and experience and you can hopefully get tonnes of people interested in open source.”
As well as taking to Kickstarter to raise funding, Kano has taken in seed funding from friends & family to develop the kit over the past year, including some funding from Index Ventures via one of its three co-founders, Saul Klein, who is a partner at the firm.
Caspar Bowden spent nearly a decade working for Microsoft, where he held the position of chief privacy adviser. He says he knew nothing of the PRISM data sharing scheme while there, a fact that’s turned him into a code-examining member of the paranoid elite.
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Organized by Systematic Paris-Region, the Open World Forum is the first European Forum summit to gather political representatives, decision-makers and experts, in one place, in order to debate the technological, economic and social impacts that the Free and Open-Source technologies bring to the market. The event is coming back for its 6th edition between the 3rd and 5th of October 2013.
The Open World Forum 2013 is being held in a global climate where the Free and Open Source Business is unaffected by the crisis, still in strong growth.
Open World Forum, Open Source Conference, Paris, Oct 3-5 original content from Ubergizmo. 
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The key to Open Source and Royalty-Free and Public Domain media is collaboration, and the furtherance of humankind by using what our predecessors have made and building up and outward. YouTube has taken to this call to action with great enthusiasm this week with the YouTube Audio Library, supporting the likes of burgeoning artists and […]
This week the team at Ultimaker have revealed their next-generation solution in the Ultimaker 2, a 3D printer that builds on the success of their first model. This second version works with Cura, a new software native to this machine – customizable and much, much faster than the average backend for processing. This machine is […]
OpenStreetMap has been diving deep into its historical data recently
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The Dextrus hand is the working prototype resulting from Joel Gibbard’s Open Hand Project, an open source hardware initiative that aims to lower the cost of robotic prosthetics dramatically. Dextrus is a fully-functional robotic hand, with features and capabilities similar to leading advanced prosthetics, but at a small fraction of the cost.
A working Dextrus is available through Gibbard’s just-launched Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for £700 for the full prosthetic version of the device, which is around $1,100 U.S. Compare that to $11,000 for the market-leading model back in 2010, for example. Gibbard is able to cut costs in a number of ways, from using less expensive materials in the construction to 3D printing component parts, as well as using existing artificial limb attachment hardware and mounts.
Gibbard, who’s based in Bristol, UK, says that after developing the original Dextrus while studying in school for a Bachelor’s of Engineering in Robotics from the University of Plymouth, and receiving numerous accolades for its design, he realized that making a material impact in the world would require more than just research. The Indiegogo campaign, which is seeking £39,000 in funding, is designed to finance work on the Open Hand Project for an entire year to help translate Gibbard’s academic research into reality.
To test and build the Dextrus, Gibbard has been working with amputee and Chef Liam Corbett, who says he’s already able to do much more with the prototype Dextrus than with the hook prosthesis he used previously.
“Liam’s the perfect candidate for the hand so I’ll be working with him throughout,” Gibbard says of the partnership between the two and their opportunistic meeting. “He’s been searching for a device like this for the last couple of years and got in touch with me through Facebook.” The Dextrus hasn’t yet been tested with other users, Gibbard says, but he’s had discussions with a prosthetist at Bristol’s Southmead hospital, who’s helping him find other good candidates.
To make the dream of an affordable, advanced prosthetic a widely-available reality, Gibbard says that he’d likely require a contract with Britain’s National Health service or similar, and that would probably entail raising at least another £10,000 or so in funding at least, which he says he’d look for from sources other than crowdfunding. The dream is both ambitious and worthy, so here’s hoping the Indiegogo campaign gives this entrepreneur a chance to get to that next stage.
Computers and sensors are quickly decreasing in cost and size, making it easier than ever before to build smart gadgets or robots. From accelerometers to thermal sensors, electronics nowadays can detect and record a variety of events and objects in their surroundings. Here’s one more sensor to add to your robot overlord-in-training. It’s called Pixy, a camera that identifies objects through color.
Pixy was made by Charmed Labs and embedded systems experts from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s actually the team’s fifth version of a smart and low-cost vision sensor, which they previously called the CMUcam. What separates the Pixy from other image sensors is that it only sends a small amount of data and it has its own microprocessor. These traits make it possible to integrate the Pixy even to microcontrollers like the Arduino.
Pixy identifies objects using “a hue-based color filtering algorithm”, which supposedly makes it consistent under different lighting conditions. It can also identify hundreds of objects at once. The image below is a screenshot of PixyMon, an open source debugging program for Pixy.
As you’ll see in the video below, Pixy can also track moving objects. That’s because it updates once every 20ms, fast enough to keep up with an object moving at 30mph. You can then gather Pixy’s data through UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital out, or analog out.
Pixy can be taught to “remember” up to seven different objects, but you can expand its memory by using color codes. Color codes are simply stickers or strips of paper with two or more different colors. Color codes increase Pixy’s color-coded encyclopedia from seven to several thousands.
Pledge at least $59 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Pixy and an Arduino cable as a reward.
What will you build with Pixy? A security camera that texts you when your cat goes out? A color-seeking water bomb? A clown-loving machine? A drone that follows you around? A box of crayons that can tell you what color you picked? A weapon that works only on people wearing red? A LEGO sorter that can tell you which pieces are missing from your collection? A camera that automatically takes pictures of the sunset? A wearable assistant for colorblind people? A ticker that counts which Premier League referee hands out the most yellow cards? A useless machine that won’t turn itself off if you’re wearing the right color? Are the things I’m saying even possible?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
