Hej guys,

this year we have decided to set up a booth at Hacknight #2 on June 19th. The goal for the night will be to have fun getting to know as many as possible within the Sweet South community of hackers and doers while putting together some electronics.

What we will offer that night:

- a place where to talk about open hardware, share project ideas, look into Arduino related issues (yeah! free consultancy, as long as we don't collapse)

- a place where to make your own Softwear and/or Nerd Uprising t-shirt, check the models here. Just bring your own t-shirt, we will have the screens and the ink with us

- if you don't feel like you want to do screen printing that night, but you still want to get one of our designs, just bring some cash, we have 30 of each to sell

- a place where to get some of the Adafruit's catalogue, cheap Arduino boards, and some of our kits that we still have in stock

- a place where to check and pre-order some very nice Japanese magazine-kits from Gakken, we have some with us for you to check, just pass by

- an Arduino pushing PCM sound out of a digital pin and a block of code in the need to become a library ... bring your own Arduino board, a stereo plug, some headphones and let's crack the code together

Ino Schlaucher, our German collaborator, has finally decided to show up on the internet. He uploaded one of his Smapler loops on Myspace. Check it out at: myspace.com/inonaga

Yes folks,

now you can make Arduino shields with us. We have been trying out different manufacturing services during the last months and we are now happy to announce we are ready to make shields for you.

We have been producing a couple of different prototypes with this service, including the OPTOshield for phone phreaking, DiMeXshield, the ViejuLCDshield, and the PONGshield (to be presented next week at Campus Party in Valencia - Spain), all products to be on our shop designed by different people.

Take a look at the service here.

One of our circuits ended up at a funky exhibition in Qatar. We just got the documentation material from the guys at quasardesign.es who made it. The installation is a promotional tool that will show company videos, and other documentation materials while playing "futbolin" (the Spanish version of table soccer). Check the video here.

The 64[DE]MUX circuit allows connecting up to 64 in/outputs to a microcontroller like Arduino. In this project they used 30 IR sensors and some other goodies together with a whole lot of computer vision algorithms made in VVVV.

If you are interested in checking out the making-off for this installation, there is this other video.

We have been working in a concept for a different type of music instrument. Putting together some feminist theory of music, some love for strange sounding animals, a laser engraver, a bunch of sliders, some orange LEDs and a lot of patience, we created the Peacock.

It is an instrument for live performace or personal exploration of both live and digitized sounds. You can get sound from an SD card or record it through its mic-in. The sound will be looped and affected in different ways by different effects and digital filters.

The engine behind the Peacock is the Smaper v1r2, adding an extra circuit for amplifying the microphone/line in. This is a conceptual instrument, meaning that we are not planning on mass-producing it. However, if you are interested in getting one, just let us know.

I spent a couple of days commuting to Denmark while conducting a basic course in Arduino for digital media at the Danish Design School. Dave Mellis, from Arduino, gave me a hand taking care of the introduction to the course, and offering us CIID's lab for our experiments.

The course counted with a bunch of dedicated participants that focused in the production of a first approach to their Bachelor thesis. We spent seven evenings talking about digital vs analog, serial communication, LED matrixes, Puredata, Arduino-based music instruments, etc.

The results were quite nice, here some links of the materials we produced. Among others:

- a library to control the PCF8563 real time clock. I have posted the work in progress at BlushingBoy's repository

- some code to drive LED matrixes straight from the Arduino processor, with direct LED control, double buffering, and time-interrupt driven (check the last example in the page)

BlushingBoy's next course will be in Critical Design, and will take place at Tomelloso's University in Design, Spain, between June 23rd and 27th ... stay tuned!

If you don't like to register in web-shops, now we have made possible to purchase from BlushingBoy without being a registered user. You can fill up your cart and post your personal details at the end of the process.

On the other hand, if you are located in Malmo, Sweden, you will get the shipping option of fetching things from our office at no delivery cost.

Finally, we closed our contract with UPS, now you can also request UPS shipments. We recommend them for orders over 2kg to remote places whener you are in the need of a transportation insurance, but also when you are in a hurry!

Tony Olsson from 1scale1, and one of our "resident designers", took some time today to shoot a bunch of excellent pictures of the process of mounting the Smapler v0001r2. We couldn't wait to put together an instructable showing the process step by step, from resistors to PS2 connector.

(c) 2009 Picture by T. Olsson

It you want to see the high quality version of the pictures, you can visit our flickr account and comment on them. In a couple of days we will also publish a couple of neat movies showing some funky ways to use the kit, as well as the source for making your own laser-cut boxes for the circuit.

Since a week ago we have been serving the second revision of the Smapler v1, also called Panora Edition (honoring the indie cinema door by door to our studio). The fact is that we sold quite a bunch, so we just run out of the microcontroller that comes with it. When calling our supplier for replacement parts, he told us we could get the latest processors at the same price!!

This means that from now on, the Smapler v1 will be shipped with the Atmega328 at the same price we were selling the kit with the previous processor.

Also, as a proof of concept, I spent some hours testing the libraries I hacked for browsing SD cards (SDuFAT) and playing sound (SDplayWAV) and I can confirm that they work with up to 4GB SD cards. With this combination of better processor and more memory, the Smapler v1 is the cheapest DIY computer of its kind in the market!

Remember you can order this kit from our shop. You could also consider making it all by yourself, get the files from the repository.

Last night I published some code examples coming from the 16KB OF SOUND workshop. I also made movies for some of those code examples during the time I spent at Arteleku in Donostia (San Sebastian).

The first example shows how to make the simplest piano out of a computer keyboard. If you keep a key pressed it will loop. It is possible to control the note's duration via one of the knobs.

Smapler v2's amplifier has a couple of special properties. It amplifies the sound and makes it ready to use with headphones or for attacking a mixer board. On the other hand, it can introduce a very warm distortion to the digital sound.

The mouse example is there to show how easy it is to play around with an old computer mouse. The code checks whether there was movement on the X axis before sending any audio to the amplifier. If the mouse moves over a certain threshold, it will use the movement as information to encode the note's pitch and duration.

This last example shows how Xabi created a kind of drum machine using a sound sequencer I wrote and controls the randomness and samplerate using the knobs on the board.

This is the undocumented feature from the Smapler v2. It tunes the Spanish National Radio!! If you leave one of the output channels unconnected at software level, the amplifier will pick up radiowaves and add some nice input to the mix.

You can find all the code shown on these videos at the SNDlib repository. There will be even more code coming in there soon. Keep in touch!