Meet the newest addition to the flock of RoboBrrds at Maker Faire: RoboBrrd Phoenix! If you are going to Maker Faire, be sure to see it in person at my RoboBrrd table (located with the other robot tables)! Read on for a few more sneak peek photos...

Just in time for Maker Faire, we've got brand new vinyl stickers, reflecting the new design of our site.

Specifications: 10.5" x 2.0" (266 x 51 mm), UV coated and weather resistant on tough vinyl, with an easy-peel backing. Shown above with Diavolino for scale.

(Sorry, no datasheet yet.)

If you'd like to show your support for our little project blog, let us humbly suggest that these new stickers just might considerably enhance the appearance of your car, laptop, lab notebook, bike, sumo robot, name tag, home-brew 3D printer, tesla coil, K'nex gun, interositor, oscilloscope, fission reactor, hovercraft, or electronic art projects.

Come find us at Maker Faire— we'll have a stack of these to give away —or pick them up at our store, where they're part of our site-wide pre-Maker Faire "DIY Fever" sale this week.

This Saturday, May 12, is the next Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market, at De Anza College in Cupertino. The market starts before dawn (for the iron hard-core) and runs until noon.

We've found some amazing stuff at this event, so if you're in the area it's definitely worth checking out.

The ROBOT PARTY is Thursday (today!) at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! In addition to everyone showing off their robots, we will be doing some trivia tonight! Also giving away a couple of Evil Mad Science prizes: a Diavolino and a Larson Scanner! Perfect for evil robot brains... :)

If you have a robot, join the hangout on Google+ HERE! Be sure to leave a comment on one of the posts so we can add you to our circles for the party.

Thanks to the new Google+ Hangouts on Air feature being available to everyone, if it works out we won't be streaming to ustream as the viewers will be able to watch it live on Google+!

What is the Robot Party?
The Robot Party is a weekly Google+ hangout that brings together robot builders from all over to share their robots, knowledge, and ask questions! It is for all age ranges, young or old, just bring your robot!
Hope to see ya at the Robot Party! ;)

Ever wondered where some of the kit projects get their inspiration to strive for clear instructions, excellent documentation, and an overall fantastic DIY experience?

Heathkits were electronics kits popular in the late 1940s and 1950s. We have a mint AC Voltmeter kit that we will be building up over the next few days! We plan to document the experience and share it with all of you! Read on for more delightful photos and descriptions!

The 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire will take place May 19 and 20— just 9 days away — in San Mateo, California. This is the big Maker Faire, and the best. If you've never been to Maker Faire, or if you've only been to one of the little ones, it's an experience not to be missed.

Today (Wednesday, May 9) is the last day to buy advance discount tickets for Maker Faire. If you don't have your tickets yet, this is a great time to get them.

This year we will again be bringing the Giant Digi-Comp II— our supersized binary digital mechanical computer —to Maker Faire. You can read all about the Giant Digi-Comp II here and see a video demonstration of it here. We will also be doing an Egg-Bot demonstration in the Maker Shed.

Finally, we'll also be participating in Maker Faire Education Day (Thursday, May 17, for K-12 students).

We hope to see you there!

Today at Wired, Chris Anderson draws attention to one of our favorite problems: Version Control for Stuff. We wrote about this last fall in our article, Improving open source hardware: Visual diffs.

In his article, Chris introduces the big ideas (using our article for an example) and discusses a couple of the current efforts towards "source code" repositories for hardware.

Instead of such expensive and closed commercial systems, we need open Web-based repositories for design files, filling the role that GitHub, Sourceforge, and Google Code have for software. (You can already use the existing code repositories for design files. And some, like GitHub, already have good ways of comparing images. But none of them were designed for CAD or PCB design, so you can’t understand the contents of the files and manage them the way you’d manage text.)

I'm not sure to what extent the latter part is truly relevant. Version control for software projects isn't necessarily context aware, so why should we expect hardware to be?

That is to say, when you commit a new revision of your code to GitHub, do you expect it to recognize— and tell you in a diff —that a given block of code represents a loop or class definition? (Likely not— just as it doesn't understand that another loop draws an integrated circuit footprint.) And, version control is already used on files that are not particularly human-readable, whether those files are ultimately used in a hardware or software context.

One might even argue that hardware is more amenable to simple diffs than software, because our eyes can take in so much information, so quickly.

But in any case, he's right on the big points: we need those visual diff tools. And yes, as version control tools do evolve to become more context aware, we'll increasingly need them to be aware of the differences between hardware and software.

Link: Wanted: Version Control for Stuff @ Wired

Over at RasterWeb, certified Egg-Bot Operator Pete Prodoehl has written at some tips for using the Eggbot as a machine for decorating ping pong balls:

I found the trick to doing them well [...] was to put the ball in with the printed logo aligned directly upwards, and then using the manual control to spin the ball 180 degrees (1600 steps) so the logo is facing downwards so you can center your plot onto the backside where you’ll have the most room and (in theory) the artwork should be centered.

We've seen plenty of printing on ping pong balls before— often in the context of beer pong(!)—but these look great, and that's a pretty neat tip about making sure that the logo doesn't get in your way.

Link: Ping-Pong Ball Bot @ RasterWeb

The ROBOT PARTY is tomorrow (Thursday) at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This is a very special edition broadcasted LIVE from Evil Mad Science that is celebrating the fantastic website LetsMakeRobots and their recent version 4 fundraiser! If you donated to their v4 fund before May 1st, then you were entered into a drawing to win 5 fabulous prizes from seeedstudio!

But the fun doesn't stop there! How are we to determine who will win these prizes? With a robot of course! Read on more!

Getting an AVR to blink might seem like an incredibly difficult task compared to the usual Arduino blink, but it really isn't! In this post we will be uploading a basic blink example to an ATtiny2313. This is perfect for projects where using an Arduino would be over the top. So let's get started!