Lucky me.
Last week I go to go to the Open Hardware Summit in New York. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to go to the Open Hardware Summit. It was the first day teaching my continuing ed class at PNCA. Turns out there was some flexibility so I did get to go but I had to leave early. Which was perfect. I had just the right amount of big city, new information, and being around a huge number of new people.
One of the speakers was Ian Lesnet from Dangerous Prototypes who gave a talk on USB versus Open Source.
| http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/10/03/open-hardware-summit-2012-usb-and-open-hardware-presentation/ |
The sessions were recorded and are posted at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/25743995. I felt both informed and inspired by most of them. During the breaks there was a lot of opportunity to talk to venders including Windell of Evil Mad Scientist labs who made the cool lego badges we all got. There were lots of purple boards, including the boards used by one of the speakers Erin Kennedy 
Also TI gave everyone one of the msp430 based launchpads.
Afterwards there was a party where I met and had extended conversations with several people including Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun, a variety of artists, and several people who were in the process of working with smaller venders to keep the process of making open source hardware in the states as well as several who were working on moving it out. One thing I didn’t get to do was talk to Tom Igoe about updating the physical computing book, it being a school night he didn’t stay for the afterparty. Next time….
I also managed to avoid Massimo Banzi somehow.
As a follow up to his talk Ian and I discussed the option of using the Microchip sublicense (which we do with the eisenhower and the tad) and after reminding me about the open source (and redistributable) usb-cdc stack for the pic he invited us to go on a geek tour of new york on friday. I was supposed to spend the day with my artist friend Eva but she had to go to Provinctown and install a pretty incredible art piece. So I took the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan and only got lost once on the way. As you can see from the video we walked about 8 miles and spent most of the day on our feet but it was worth it. Thanks to Dangerous Prototypes and everyone else they drug along with us.
| http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/10/05/global-geek-tour-new-york-2012-video/ |
The tour was in some ways better than the conference in terms of connecting to new people and ideas.
one of the tour members Yoshi (introduced in the video above) was giving out free copies of the lpc1114 arm cortex-m0 in a dip! He also had some pointers on getting code onto it and even a pointer to an arduino core written for it (though most of the details are in japanese).
By days end, after crashing the Makerfaire setup party, and going to the east village for a decent Italian meal, I was ready to get back to Portland.
When I got home I thought I had lost the new arm chip so I ordered 15 of them from arrow.
Now I have a fresh plate of things to think about. And two new platforms to play with (I know the msp430 isnt new exactly).
I plan to populate the breadboard version of the lpc1114 today and tomorrow and will probably bring it to the dorkbotpdx meeting on monday.