WIRED.COM and BIOBugs

Every year a group of my friends have an engineering Secret Santa. The rules are simple: make something cool for under $20 that requires engineering to complete. In years past we’ve seen Google cardboard VR headsets that are 6DOF, match stick rockets, 3D printed fans that explode when used, 3D printed rockets with cardboard launch […]

Wheee! It's finally outta my hair - the Sumovore PIC Brainboard now available to all you microcontroller fans that insist on programmable robots. Complete with a 5 pin and RJ11-6 port, you can use practically all PIC programming tools and hardware (or build your own programming cable as detailled in the instruction) to put your […]

Unlike Sparkfun, who actually manage to find fake Atmel ICs, we just get strange batches. The Atmel ATMega328 is the power behind the Arduino/Freeduino/*duino, and we have to set up a programming system to burn the venerable Arduino Bootloader into these chips. We normally use an AVR STK500 in HVSP (high voltage serial programming) mode, […]

The Useless Box is continuing to populate the world with useless... usefullness, and that means it's time for another update on the Make Something Useless Useful project. You might remember we started in 2012 by donating a percentage of past sales of Useless Boxes to Plan Canada. This year we are donating $6000 to assist […]