Hasta La Gadget!

With every subsequent post, our excitement for Expand New York grows — and this is a particularly good one. We might go so far as saying that this is our most exciting speaker post yet, but we’ll leave that for you to decide. Improvisational musician / comedian Reggie Watts will be on stage discussing and demoing his sampling setup. We’ll also be joined once again by Boing Boing founder and Make Magazine editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder, along with Sol Design Lab founder Beth Ferguson, Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick and Sparkfun’s educational outreach coordinator, Jeff Branson.

And, of course, we’ve already announced a number of folks who will be joining us on November 9th and 10th, including LeVar Burton, Ben Heck, Peter Molyneux, Ben Huh and folks from companies like Google, Sony, Pebble, Adafruit and The Electronic Frontier Foundation — and we’ve still got plenty to come. Check out the full list below.

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Source: Expand Speakers

We’re a bit torn when we arrive at the Boulder Reservoir, past all the chain-linked signs warning of “potential danger ahead.” The organizers of the Autonomous Vehicle Competition are running two separate tracks — land and air — and frankly, we don’t have the resources to cover both. As the competitors scramble to complete last-minute repairs in the Team Pits area, we approach an employee in a red SparkFun T-shirt, to suss out the best plan of attack. “A lot of the aerial vehicles tend to fail in the first round,” she answers, without much deliberation, “so it’s probably best to start there.” The organizers would’ve been hard-pressed to have constructed a more beautiful Colorado spring day, as “Come Fly With Me” wafts over the PA while spectators settle into the bleachers and competitors find spots at the edge of the gravel pit.

Thirty teams will compete for the $1,000 aerial grand prize. The task: taking off autonomously, staying within the allowed fly zone, dropping a tennis ball onto a thin sliver of land inside the reservoir, ducking beneath a goalpost-like wicket and landing on the same surface from where it took off — and, as the name implies, all this must be done via a pre-programmed set of instructions without external control. The takeoff, it seems, is the hardest, as the first several competitors are knocked out of the contest, failing to launch in all sorts of spectacular fashions, including fixed-wing aircraft that just can’t seem find their way into the clear Colorado sky, sliding along the gravel or twitching mechanically atop the PVC launchpad. When a quadcopter finally manages to lift off successfully, there’s an audible sigh of relief amongst the crowd, followed by explosive applause. When it works, it’s magic.

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There are certain things you’d expect to encounter on a visit to NASA’s Swamp Works research facility. Walking into the former Apollo testing facility, you’ll almost certainly catch glimpses of martian rovers, soil samples and an assortment of scientific testing devices. But in spite of Arduino’s near ubiquity these days, we’ll admit that we were a bit taken aback when the familiar blue microcontroller made an appearance on a lab desk during our conversation with NASA “lighting guy,” Dr. Eirik Holbert. It seems that NASA, like pretty much everyone else, is experimenting with the hacker-friendly component.

The board was hooked up to a lighting fixture Holbert is working on as part of NASA’s upcoming deep space habitat concept generator. It’s an attempt to bring some sunlit consistency to space exploration, simulating Earth-like lighting patterns to help keep the crew alert and get them ready for sleep in the evenings. So, where does NASA turn when it’s looking to conserve weight and save some taxpayer money in the process? Toward the Arduino Uno, naturally. Holbert assembled a number of off-the-shelf products, including the aforementioned microcontroller and shields from Sparkfun to make a fixture for under $500.

Asked whether we might be seeing an Arduino setup like this on an upcoming mission, Dr. Holbert told us, “I’m all about interchangeability. If they can make something space compatible, I’d be all for it.”

Filed under: Science

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