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In This Issue...

Come Play at the Great Handcar Regatta
Laser Craze: Nick Leindecker (video)
Type Yourself a Drink
Open Hardware Needs a SourceForge of its Own by Mach 30 @ Kickstarter
More Recent Articles

Come Play at the Great Handcar Regatta

We’ll be marveling at the rail-bound, handmade, human-powered race vehicles tomorrow at the fourth annual Great Handcar Regatta in Santa Rosa, Calif. The Regatta takes place in historic Railroad Square from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. with the first of two heats starting at noon (“to be taken with a grain of salt on race day as reality permits”). Check out the list of race teams and timeline on the site. Pictured above is the Whiskeydrunk Cycles crew racing the Tandemonium. MAKE will be there with our vintage fire truck parked by the race stage. Come by and say hi! Once again, we’ll be giving out the Make: Spectacular Failure Award celebrating failure as a key component of learning. Last year it went to the Delirium crew for their Sac Toe Geto Blaster. All we’re gonna say is that this year our award has flames. See you there!

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Laser Craze: Nick Leindecker (video)

Nick Leindecker of the Stanford Optical Society shows Laser Craze, a laser cutter that is controlled by two knobs much in the way an Etch a Sketch works. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he allowed attendees to try out his invention on various burnable surfaces, while also showing his LED creations.

Subscribe to the Maker Faire Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v
video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.

Check out more videos from Maker Faire Bay Area 2011.

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List Building for Bloggers: Proven email stategies that build your audience, increase engagement and grow your income. Launch pricing available thru May 23, 2011.

Type Yourself a Drink

Thanks to Morskoiboy’s creation, you can now touch type your own Tom and Jerry. This syringe-based keyboard pumps various colored potables through 136 tubes totaling 30 meters of length. But before being poured into the glass, the liquid is pushed through the appropriate parts of a 14 segment display, indicating the letter you pressed. According to Morskoiboy: “My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words.” I wonder what E-P-I-C W-I-N tastes like? [via Technabob]

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Open Hardware Needs a SourceForge of its Own by Mach 30 @ Kickstarter

Open Hardware Needs a SourceForge of its Own by Mach 30 @ Kickstarter.

The problem
If you want to host an open source hardware project today, you have to cobble together wikis, forums, online polls, blogs, and online file storage to share your materials. Then you have to send the link (or links) to your “system” to the people you already know who might be interested in participating. For a person who just wants to start designing and building cool stuff all that pre-work is a giant pain in the you-know-what.

So is it any wonder that most makers interested in open sourcing their designs tend to skip that step, do all the work themselves and then just release the final designs on the web when they get around to it?

There has to be a better way.

In order for open source hardware to become as prevelant and infulential in the hardware community as FOSS is in the software community we need a way to integrate the required services into a single system, as well as provide a destination for users looking for open source hardware projects to build or to extend to get involved in the community.

Enter Open Design Engine.

The solution
If it takes a forge to develop open source software, then you need an engine to develop open source hardware. Introducing Open Design Engine (ODE). ODE is a web based engineering project management system created to facilitate the design and development of openly licensed hardware projects. ODE provides a critical service to the growing open source hardware community, similar to the role Source Forge played in the early growth of open source software.

ODE is based on the open source software Redmine and is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). ODE is being distributed in a similar manner to WordPress. Which means there will be a version available for download that users can install on their own servers (like http://wordpress.org) and a hosted version where users can register accounts and host projects (like http://wordpress.com).

Version 0.1 of the site is up and running at https://opendesignengine.net, but before user accounts can be made available to the public, V0.2 must be completed.