FLORA is a new open-source wearable electronics platform by Adafruit Industries. The platform is based around a programmable circular microcontroller that is less than two inches in diameter. Adafruit is developing the platform for sale in the near future.

For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit’s community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers. After months of planning, designing and working with partners around the world for the best materials and accessories, we can share what we’re up to. The hardware is now in the hands of our staff and testers!

We call it the FLORA.

MakerBot Replicator is a new 3D printer from MakerBot Industries (video). The open source printer can make larger objects than its predecessor, and is available with two extrusion heads, allowing for two color or two material printing.

The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop.With a build envelope that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread, The MakerBot Replicator™ gives you the power to go big. Make an entire chess set with the press of a button.

A Decentralized Dance Party is an open source dance party in which the music is transmitted to nearby boomboxes via a small FM transmitter (video). The concept was created by Canadian party enthusiasts Tom and Gary. The duo will be holding decentralized dance parties throughout the US during their upcoming tour Party Safari 2011: Strictly Business USA. They’re funding individual tour stops on Kickstarter.

We are Tom and Gary, two lifelong friends who love to Party.
And we believe that Partying is the most misunderestimated artistic medium in existence.
Accordingly, we created Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party aka The Party Revolution.

Our goal is to further the frontiers of Partying, bring joy to millions of people and ensure that Partying is respected, legitimized, and forever enshrined as a spiritual movement of paramount importance.

photos via Decentralized Dance Party

Le BigRep is an oversized open source 3D printer by Kurt Circuit that can print objects up to the dimensions of its one cubic meter build window. It is based on RepRap, a free desktop 3D printer.

Imagine printing furniture, sculptures and other life size structures and experimenting with materials which are maybe more useful on a larger scale, like concrete, home-cooked starchplastics, or maybe the leftovers of your cnc-mil mixed with some resin?

via Ponoko & Make

photos via Ponoko

Chris over at The New Hobbyist has recreated the four singing Grim Grinning Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction on his porch and has provided detailed instructions on how to make them using styrofoam heads, an Arduino UNO board and various parts.

So once you’ve got your hardware and software all playing nice the only thing left to do it arrange the heads in a trick-or-treater friendly area and wait to BLOW KIDS MINDS. The neighborhood kids seemed to really get a kick out of the display (some coming back with friends to show them). It was a lot of fun and taught me a thing or two about the Arduino.

via Instructables

images via The New Hobbyist

The Night and Day Clock by Justin Shaw is an open source clock that shows where the sun is shining on the earth’s surface. The pattern of sunlight and darkness is displayed on LEDs which illuminate a translucent map of the world. The Night and Day Clock is based on the open source Wise Clock 3.

via Hack A Day

photo by Justin Shaw

Mike Krumpus of Nootropic Design has crafted a real alarm clock, the Defusable Clock, designed to look like sticks of dynamite complete with a countdown clock. More than that, the clock is “defusable”. Practicing your bomb-defusing skills has never been more fun, safe or timely.

I thought it would be fun to build an alarm clock that looks just like the type of bomb that we always see in Hollywood movies. I certainly don’t know anything about how a real bomb might look, but in the movies they always have sticks of dynamite strapped together, a red digital readout, and a bunch of curly wires. Instead of just building an ordinary clock, I thought it should have a detonation sequence with a scary countdown just like in the movies. And why not make it “defusable” so I an try to stop the countdown by cutting the correct wire?

Using an ATmega328 microcontroller to power the board, the clock is customizable for those with Arduino knowledge. Nootropic Design will soon offer a kit with the proper electronics for building a version of this clock at home. You may want to start collecting paper towel tubes now so your dynamite sticks are ready when the kit ships.

With some imagination, I’m sure you can make a great looking Defusable Clock, but don’t go scaring anyone with it, and don’t bring it anywhere near an airport, ok? The product page will have plenty of warnings not to use this kit for any evil purposes or get into trouble with your school, employer, or local law enforcement!

via Make

image via Nootropic Design

Adafruit Industries has created the iNecklace, an aluminum open source pendant with a pulsating LED. Equipped with a circuit board, this piece comes with its own downloadable source code, circuit board files, schematics and CAD files, found on GitHub. A silver necklace is included with purchase, as is a velveteen box, perfect for gift-giving. Now ladies can step out on the town with their iCufflink-wearing pals.

Perfect for the playa or with Prada. Made for women who celebrate art, science, engineering and great design.

I appreciated their video that showed the pendant’s assembly process.

photos by Adafruit Industries and Becky Stern

Open Hardware Summit 2011 takes place September 15 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens.

The Open Hardware Summit is the world’s first comprehensive conference on open hardware, founded and chaired by Alicia Gibb and Ayah Bdeir. The Open Hardware Summit was be a venue to discuss and draw attention to the rapidly growing open source hardware movement. Speakers at the Summit include world renowned leaders from industry, academia and the DIY community. The summit focused on hardware as a system through a series of discussions and panels on BUSINESS, LAW, MANUFACTURING, SCALING, DESIGN and EDUCATION. The one-day Summit sought to empower companies, large and small, to produce electronic objects in an open source fashion.

Blocklets are a system of modular interlocking pieces that can be used to build anything from furniture to trebuchets. The pieces are lasercut from wood or acrylic and the design is open source. A collaboration between artist Mark Plaga and engineer Gabe Cantor, initial funding for Blocklets is being raised on Kickstarter.

We are passionate about making things. We created Blocklets first foremost for ourselves. We started with the idea of creating a modular system for making beautiful sculpture. We believe we have succeeded. This is why we invented Blocklets, not to bring them to the market, or to do a Kickstarter project. We’re here on Kickstarter because the people we’ve shared them with couldn’t get enough of them.

We love Blocklets we think once you get your hands on them you’ll love them too. Right now Blocklets are sculptural building blocks. With your support we can turn Blocklets into a multifaceted tool, useful for quickly producing everything from art to furniture to whatever you can imagine.?

photo by Scott Beale

In a wonderfully detailed, video-rich post, Lifehacker goes Lady Gaga for Ladyada and our friend Phillip Torrone guestblogs on what makes Limor Fried Lifehacker’s MacGyver of the Day. It’s impossible not to be impressed and awed; after reading the post we think Fried is a tenacious and prolific genius who’s cut a powerful swath for women engineers, designers and makers. Watch only half the videos in which mastermind Fried explains from her secret underground laboratory the many ways you can create your own doomsday devices life simplifying gadgets, and you’ll see why we think she’s more like the woman MacGyver would run crying to for help like a little girl should he actually be caught in a tough spot and needed to, say, make a cell phone jammer. Limor (Adafruit Industries) is quoted saying,

“In contemporary Western society, electronic devices are becoming so prevalent that many people find themselves surrounded by technologies they find frustrating or annoying. The electronics industry has little incentive to address this complaint (…) By building functional prototypes that reflect equal consideration of technical and social issues, I identify three attributes of Noir products: Personal empowerment, participation in a critical discourse, and subversion.”

The post is like a “best of” Ladyada’s most effective and slightly subversive designs, explained in step-by-step DIY terms and gifted to any and all as open source projects. In addition, the videos featuring Fried and Torrone creating and experimenting with the edgy electronics are nerdy and subtly hilarious, making them fun to watch even if you can’t solder your way out of a paper bag. However, if you did want to learn how, we’re pretty sure they’ve got a humorous video tutorial. Don’t miss her fantastic weekly “ask an engineer” show.

Google has just announced their new open source browser Chrome. The announcement came in the form of a web comic by Scott McCloud.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

Google Blogoscoped has posted some screenshots of Google Chrome browser.

UPDATE 1: The beta release of the Chrome browser now available for download. Currently Chrome is only available for Windows Vista/XP.

UPDATE 2: Google has posted some Chrome tutorial videos on YouTube.

See Previously: Understanding Comics – The Books Of Scott McCloud

Reddit has just announced that they are going open source and releasing their code to the public. Here’s a video by their alien mascot explaining this decision.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing reddit. We’ve always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step. When we say ‘open-source’ we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we’re inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site.

MG Siegler has a great write-up on Reddit’s announcement over on Venture Beat.

My friend William Hurley (aka whurley) is asking the important question “Who is the best candidate for the open source community?”. To help answer that question he’s running an online poll.

Assume for a moment that a knowledge of open source is prerequisite (or integral) in solving issues like patent reform. Who would you vote for? In other words, who would be the best candidate for the open source community? Here’s a little poll to tally your votes. I took the top three performing candidates from the two major parties.

Kevin Burton has just informed me that open source software developer Greg Stein, Director of the Apache Software Foundation, was mugged and seriously injured last Friday in Mountain View. Kevin Burton has setup a donation fund for Greg to help with his recovery. What really sucks about this is that Greg was on crutches from a previous injury when he was viciously attacked, making it difficult for him to defend himself. Ben Metcalfe has written about Greg’s fund as well.

In addition to Apache, Greg has worked on many open source projects including WebDAV, Python and Subversion.

I made a quick stop by the expo at LinuxWorld 2007 today over at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I was sad to see the continuing shrinkage of the .org Pavilion. I remember when LinuxWorld first started, the entire convention was represented by .org’s, now it’s just two small rows in the back corner. The tie-dyes, gray beards and sandals are a rare sight, Tux is wearing a business suit now.

Here are some photos I shot of the expo at LinuxWorld 2007.

Our friends over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories recently launched The CandyFab Project, an online resource for their open source 3D sugar fabrication process, which they were showing off at Maker Faire 2007. Check out the photos of some of the “sweet” stuff they have made so far.

The printing process begins with a bed of a granular printing media that has a fairly low melting point. Using a narrow, directed, low-velocity beam of hot air, we selectively fuse together the print media, forming a two-dimensional image out of the fused grains. We then lower the bed by a small amount, add a thin flat layer of media to the top of the bed, and selectively fuse the media in the new layer, forming a two dimensional image that is also fused to any overlapping fused areas in the layer below. By repeating this process, a three-dimensional object is slowly built up. At the end of the build, the bed is raised to its original position, disinterring the fabricated model, while unused media is reclaimed for use in building the next object.

They are looking for volunteers to help out with the project, if you know of anyone.

Linux and open source geeks will be converging in San Francisco next week for LinuxWorld 2007, which takes place August 6th through 9th, at Moscone Center. As with previous years, I’ll be spending a lot of time over in the .org Pavilion with our friends from organizations like EFF and Creative Commons.

Here are my photos from last year’s LinuxWorld 2006.

UPDATE: Here are my photos from LinuxWorld 2007.

Last Thursday at the Digg Million User Celebration, Ladyada of Adafruit Industries and Phillip Torrone (Make Magazine) debuted their new, open source Digg Button Kits (v1.0). The kits contain multiple components that when soldered together create are really cool manual LED Digg Button that you can digg up to 999 and then reset back to 0. Who knows, maybe someone will be able to configure these to work with the new Digg API.

The kits help teach people beginner electronics, including soldering and programing microcontrollers. Adafruit Industries have even setup some new hacks, mods and projects for the Digg Buttons and they are selling the kits for $15 each, with $1 of each purchase being donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Digg kit was created when Phillip Torrone (Makezine.com), Kevin Rose (Digg.com) and (Ladyada) met up for a drink. We thought it might be interesting to inspire the next generation of technologists and hobbyists who frequent Digg with a fun and easy project that not only teaches but is a lot of fun.

Graffiti Research Lab has developed a LASER tagging system that allows people to project images on entire building facades using a green laser and a DLP projector. Check out the amazing video and photos from their tests in Rotterdam. They’ve even released the source code and a “how to” for their LASER tag.

via » Boing Boing

Dr. Evangelos Michelakis at University of Alberta reports that the drug dichloroacetate (DCA) may have a big impact in the fight against cancer by stopping the growth of cancer cells, without harming normal cells. It doesn’t have a patent, which makes it inexpensive and research shows it would not have the same negative side-affects of traditional chemotherapy. The drug can be made in power form which could be dissolved in a glass of water for the patient drink.

The main challenge for University of Alberta is finding the funding to conduct clinical trials on humans. The question is, does a cancer fighting drug that would not be profitable to pharmaceutical companies have any chance of success? Could this be a good candidate for open source medical research?

Investigators at the University of Alberta have recently reported that a drug previously used in humans for the treatment of rare disorders of metabolism is also able to cause tumor regression in a number of human cancers growing in animals. This drug, dichloroacetate (DCA) appears to suppress the growth of cancer cells without affecting normal cells, suggesting that it might not have the dramatic side effects of standard chemotherapies.

DCA research donations can be made to Dr. Michelakis’ Cancer Research Fund through The University of Alberta.

For updates on funding, research and testing, keep an eye on University of Alberta DCA Research Information page.

Here’s more coverage of the DCA cancer research news:

“Alberta scientists test chemotherapy alternative” (CBC News)

“Cancer finding hailed” (Melissa Leong, National Post)

“Lots of interest in funding new cancer drug trials” (Edmonton Sun)

“Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers” (Andy Coghlan, New Scientist)

“Small Molecule Offers Big Hope Against Cancer” (Science Daily)

“Small molecule could be big cancer fighter” (The Why Files)

My friend Phillip Torrone, senior editor of Make Magazine, just posted a really awesome Open Source Gift Guide. This is a great place to start your search if you hunting around for that perfect gift for fellow open source geeks.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy – but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you’ll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source.

The wait is over, Firefox 2 was released yesterday. Holy crap, this little open source project has really come a long way. I’m back to having it as my full time browser after using Camino for the last few months. Aside from the fact that it is faster, more secure, less prone to crashing (and if does, Session Restore will bring you back to where you were), has better tabbing and a bunch of new features, it finally has built-in spell checking. In fact, it’s finding all my spelling errors directly in the WordPress editor as I type this. That’s something that I’ve wanted to do forever without having a special plug-in or extension. I finally feel like I have a real browser.

More coverage of the Firefox 2 launch can be found over at Tailrank here and here.

How do you make Firefox 2 even better? Try out some of the over 1000 add-ons that are available.

If you are as excited about the new Firefox as I am, you can celebrate its release at the nearest Firefox Party as well as letting others know about it through Spread Firefox.

UPDATE: Gina Trapani just posted some awesome Firefox 2 config tweaks on Lifehacker.

Chris Messina has outed me on my secret plot to rid the world of the traditional “Happy Birthday” song. Aside from the fact that it has the least inspired lyrics of almost any song ever written, it is also not even in the public domain, but instead protected by a copyright until 2030. We need to open source the Happy Birthday song and release it under Creative Commons. Of course this is not a new idea. Kuro5hin has a great write-up on the legal issues surrounding “Happy Birthday”.

Violet Blue’s first article for “Violet Blue: Open Source Sex”, her new sex column in the San Francisco Chronicle, was published in today’s paper: “Club Kiss for that thoroughly modern vibe”

Here’s Violet’s write-up on today’s launch of her column. Ryan Is Hungry shot a great video interview with Violet an hour before the article came out. Yay Violet!

Now here’s the bad news. At the very last minute, senior management at the Chronicle removed all of the outside links from her column, in fact they won’t even link to Violet’s blog. One step forward, two steps back. Will mainstream media ever get it?

Of course, because it’s me (and it’s sex), it didn’t happen without issue. At the last minute, the publisher got freaked out about my links and so (for now, I think) my column will be running without links to any of the sites or topics I’m talking about. Yeah, it’s *weird* for an online column… And dude — they don’t even link to Tiny Nibbles from my column’s page. But the Chron and I are continuing to talk about it and the topic is by no means closed.

Violet will be posting the links for each column on her blog (as she has for today’s column) until the Chronicle resolves this issue.

Regardless of this minor setback, we are extremely proud of Violet and the launch of her groundbreaking column.

UPDATE: A group of pranksers have been modifying bus shelters with unauthorized promotional posters for Violet’s new column. Here’s the first one and the second one. If you see any others, please leave let us know in the comments.