Wednesday Cool Links, Announcements and ...

We were at the San Mateo MakerFaire, and were representing for BPS breadboards. They've announced their winners, and the first place went to  Elizabeth from Houston, Texas (age 11) (and we like unicorns too):

Now that we have established our stance towards robotic (roboCorns) and regular unicorns (unicornus vulgaris), here's some links. They are just as magical:

	Fletcher Tables This is definitely out of garage-duct tape-hot glue DIY range, but the craftsmanship is amazing, especially it's worth seeing it in motion, check out the video.
	Robosans: Robot Made Digital Typography An intersection of typography and robotics, a font created by manipulating the controller on the OWI robotic arm.
	Completely analog electronic music box An analog music box [Steven Dufresne], that uses 555 timer and can generate 13 different tones. Electronically simple and mechanically elegant solution. And it plays music!
	NES: Nixie Entertainment System Tiny nixies are fun! Nintendo emulator combined with a nixie clock by [Bradley W. Lewis] is all kinds of retro-tastic.
	Watch JPL's RoboSimian Do Pull-Ups We've seen lots of articulated robots, but this one eerily resembles a simian, with all four limbs capable of mobility and manipulation.

Oh, do I ever wish I had a roboCorn to hold things, for example as my coat rack... But isn't that a waste of unicornal resources? Dear Elizabeth from Houston, Texas, please build one for me, I would find a good use for it.

And before I conclude, wanted to mention that Solarbotics will have a booth at the MakerFaire YYC at Alberta College of Art+Design on September 13 and 14, with the various electronic goodies and the Arduino workshop. Also noteworthy are our fellow Calgary manufacturers - BPS, the makers of prototyping boards, who I mentioned at the beginning of this post in relation to the unicorns. They (not unicorns, the BPS!) will also be doing  a demo on using C Programming for AVRs/Arduinos and a demo on using breadboards.

See y'all (or some) there!