Weekly Roundup #03 - New Maker Products // News
This week in the Weekly Roundup we have some desktop fabrication devices, robots and other great stuff.
Crowd Funding
KickStarter
The First Desktop Waterjet Cutter
You know how a lot of campaigns start with “world’s first” blah blah. Well this one is one of the few that can claim that title.
Holy Toledo batman! A desktop waterjet cutter! I just hope that they’ve sorted out any leakage problems.
This one has 59 days to go and is already 4 times over their goal.
This is the point at which a lot of great campaigns fail - where they over commit.
LokBuild : 3D Print Build Surface
If you’re in to 3D printing then this looks interesting. It’s primary purpose is to avoid warping of prints that can occur with other platforms. You can also throw away your tape! Cool!
Supports any type of filament.
Hobby Hand 2.0 - Prosthetic Hand Robotics Kit
If you want to get into robotics, then this next kickstarter will give you a hand. Literally.
It’s a low cost robotic hand built from 3D printed parts, using cables and a single servo per digit to mimic a human hand more accurately.
Will set you back $175 for one hand.
Zubi Flyer | The First Hackable Frisbee
A Frisbee that hackable? Cool! This is a nice little product aimed at teaching kids to code up some games with the Frisbee. Hmmmm. Wonder if it’s child proof?
minkeFLIP light switch
This next one is a great idea, but one to be careful of. It’s basically an attempt to standardize home automation by providing an Open Hardware platform which contains Wifi, capacitive touch, and a TRIAC capable of switching up to 15Amps.
They have a tough road ahead of them. There are a lot of hoops they need to jump through to meet all the worldwide standards and they vary in every country.
IndieGoGo
Omega2: $5 Linux Computer with Wi-Fi, Made for IoT
Hey! If you missed the KickStarter campaign you have some time to pick up an Omega2 from IndieGogo.
Awesome Shield: Code School for Future Inventors
This next one is pretty cool for STEM students. It’s essentially an Arduino board and sensor shield supporting Grove, but the intent is to provide a complete STEM package for students to get into coding. Nice.
Brixo - Building Blocks Meet Electricity and IoT
Next one is Brixo. A lego style building block, that is. Er OK. 1434% funded. OK.
It provides three modules, trigger, connector and action block. The trigger blocks can be bluetooth, or sound, light and proximity sensors.
While action blocks can be lights or motors.
This one is really nice and no surprise it’s over 1,400% funded.
IQube - The Ultimate Toy for Learning Electronics
Keeping on with the learning theme. The iQube attempts to teach electronics by removing all the soldering. You just magnetically connect blocks together to form your circuits and it interacts with your smartphone or PC.
You have a variety of input and output cubes to choose from.
The next four are robotic products.
STEMI - A Robot You Can Make On Your Own At Home
STEMI is a hexapod robot controlled from you smartphone.
Marty The Robot
Ganker: Fighting Robot for the Whole Crew
Ganker, aimed at the people wanting to fight each other, or get their robots to do it for them.
Ziro: World’s First Hand-controlled Robotics Kit
and Ziro, which is controlled just by waving your hands around.
MATRIX Creator: IoT Computer Vision Dev Board #Pi
This next one is a sensor board for the PI. It seems to attracting a lot of interest except from backers.
Not sure why, but it you gives a whole bunch of sensors that would add up to a lot more than buying individually.
KeKePad: World’s First Plug&Play Wearable Platform
Oh look! A world’s first plug and play wearable platform? Why is it a world’s first?
Oh, I see yup. They are providing a super thin cable that plugs into the board instead of using etextile conductive thread. That’s a good idea.
Wonder though if the cable is washable?
Go from 3D printing to Desktop Injection Moulding
Holy Toledo batman! Desktop injection moulding! Fantastic!
Yes, I agree 3D printing is too slow for production runs, but usually injection moulding tooling is quite finnicky and hard to get right, but this guy seems to have come up with something that works.
ESP3212 Wifi Bluetooth Combo Module
If you are a fan of the ESP8266 then this will make you drool. If you haven’t already heard the ESP3212 based modules have been in production runs for a while now and you can now get your hands on a Seeed module.
The ESP3212 now has bluetooth 4.2, 16M flash, SD card interface, capacitive touch, and an Xtensa LX6 dual core MCU. Got you drooling yet?
Well, the planned shipping date is the 25th October currently, and I’d say they’re going to run out of that batch as well.
Get it while it’s hot!
