Maker Faire UK 2013 great success

Hi everyone, I’ve finished spent two great days at Maker Faire UK in Newcastle were I helped out on Makerspace’s stand

I think I can safely say that Maker Faire 2013 was a great success, especially  for Makerspace.

A very big thank you to all members who were able to man our stand and for all those members who visited us during the Faire. We have lots and lots of people visiting our stand checking out who we were and what we do. We hope many of them will become new members.

Our tables were jam pack with our creations and builds, so many, I think we emptied Makerspace

Ed’s Laser Caper game was a roaring success. Every time I passed there were queues of people patiently wait to have a go.

Brian’s DIYBio table was also a great success with many people leaving their bacteria, myself include, for Brian to cultivate.

We met up with many, many makers from around the UK and Ireland and have we have made many new friends.

Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire 7th April 2013

Just got back from Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire

We met up with HackLab , the Edinburgh hackspace which has just moved into ot’s new premises

MakLab a Glasgow based “professional” hackspace that offers a commercial fabrication service but still has supports its hacker roots.

New MiniPiio SimpleIO and RS485

We’ve got a couple of new MiniPiio boards in the works.

The first MiniPiio is SimpleIO which is 8x LED’s and 8x Tactile Switches connected to the GPIO signals. This is currently being manufactured, so we’ll let you know how it goes.

The second MiniPiio is a serial RS485 board. It’s the one I’ve been asked a lot for. The layout is finished and its going out for manufacture next week.

MiniPiio Boards now stocked by Elektronik Lavpris Aps

We are please to announce that our MiniPiio Boards are now stocked by

Elektronik Lavpris Aps of Denmark

You can find them on their website:

http://www.elektronik-lavpris.dk

Maker Faire UK is back

Maker Faire is back in the UK on Saturday and Sunday 27th and 28th of April 2013. Once again it’s being held in Newcastle.

More details here:

http://www.makerfaireuk.com

The previous Maker Faires were great events and we thoughly enjoyed going to them. This year Newcastle Maker Space and many of the other UK Maker and Hacker spaces will have a big presence.

There’s also a Mini Maker Faire on Saturday 7th April 2013 in Edinburgh. More details here:

http://makerfaireedinburgh.com/

MiniPiio AIN4

We’ve been working on a new MiniPiio module for the Raspberry Pi.

Lately we’ve being making a lot of digital I/O modules so we thought it was time to do something analogue. So we’ve design a 4-ch analog to digital board. It uses a either 10-bit MCP3004 or 12-bit MCP3204 ADC from Microchip.

Prototypes of the board are being made and we’ll have them soon.

New PCB batch

We got a new batch of PCB’s yesterday.

In the packet were two new board designs and a revision to a favourite.

We’ll start with the new boards:

MiniPiio MIDI – MIDI In and Out functions with a pin header to wire straight to your DIN connectors,

MinIPiio Expander2 – A new carrier board which takes two different MiniPiio boards, doubling your MiniPiio fun! It has a on-board 3.3V power supply and cut-able tracks in case you need to isolate or swap signals.

Our favourite MiniPiio ProtoBoard was given a size makeover to make it a standard 40 x 50mm MiniPiio footprint. This allows it to work with the new MiniPiio Expander 2 board.