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PC to PCB in under 30 minutes - Quick 'n Easy PCB Fabrication

Submitted by Adrian Carter on November 25, 2011


With the explosion of the hobbyist microcontroller scene the past few years, PCB fab houses have sprung up left right and centre. At these wonderous places, you can get professional quality PCBs fabricated for your every desires for relatively low costs. They can range from very low cost and looooong lead times, to reasonable prices (~$50-$100) for low volume runs ('protoype' services). At the larger end of the scale, you can panelise your design and get even better value per PCB...

Aussie Maker GorillaBuilderz Is Working On Wifi Shield

Submitted by Chris on November 23, 2011

We're very happy to see some more Down-Under OSHW-- Aussie Maker GorillaBuilderz (twitter @GorillaBuilderz) is working on an Arduino-compatible Wifi Shield to fill in the void caused by the closure of AsyncLabs. A huge improvement over previous Wifi Shields is GorillaBuilderz plan for compatibility with the Arduino Ethernet Library. Check out their website for more news!



TinkerKit System Is Like Lego For Arduino

Submitted by Chris on June 19, 2011


The Arduino TinkerKit system released early this month unveils a modular set of sensors and actuators that can be connected to the Arduino Uno or Mega without any soldering. The set is already quite comprehensive including push-buttons, LEDs, a relay, potentiometers, a MOSFET and an accelerometer. The TinkerKit hub is an Arduino shield that allows you to connect to the TinkerKit components with standard 3-pin cables. Look out for these soon in Australia!

Canberra UAV Progresses with Robot Vision Test Flight

Submitted by Chris on June 08, 2011

Canberra's own autonomous aerial robot team, Canberra UAV has now progressed to adding robot vision to their UAV which will be entered into the UAV Outback Challenge. Andrew Tridgell, inventor of Rsync and core contributor of the Samba project is leading up the artificial intelligence programming for the entry. As reported at a Make Hack Void Maker Meetup, Tridgell has made some progress with their machine vision camera attempting to locate an IR beacon on the ground while flying. His robot vision program is using OvenCV to detect "Outback Joe", a Canberra UAV team member laying on the ground pointing the IR beacon upwards. Tridgell explains their first attempts were about 50% accurate in locating Outback Joe-- the blurry, badly focused camera along with early algorithms (a total of 40 lines of Python) are at fault for the false positives and positive negatives. Following are some images of the team's robot vision test flight.



A successful location of "Outback Joe". Tridgell explains that the resulting "spot" of the IR beacon was only 1 pixel-- a cause for concern until they can upgrade their camera to one with higher resolution.



An image of the edge detection algorithm.