Tinker it now!

A lovely “hardware sketching” event was put together in San Francisco by ThingM and some of the Arduino folks turned up for the fun.

Check it out!

Here at tinker.it, we thought it was about time we organized a hardcore hackers event! And where else but in swinging London!

On the weekend of the 21-22 of July 2007, Massimo Banzi and Matt Biddulph will spend a weekend helping out 15 hardcore hackers with their projects.

So we heard you lound and clear and revised some of the requirements for the workshop. Now you just need to have some more extended Arduino skills and you can go register immediately!

We’ve also put up a schedule of the weekend and I’ll update this post with the guest hackers we get to join us that weekend.

Update: We have the great pleasure of having Moritz Waldemeyer be a guest hacker on the Sunday morning, if you don’t want to miss this, sign up!

Update: All details on the event, pics, attendees, etc… on the microsite here. Enjoy!

We have received a lot of emails about this board… more than we can handle…

I thought I would update everybody on what’s going to happen with it.

The idea of arduino ethernet started off in december 2005 when me and gianluca were working on an installation that required reading a bunch of touch sensors and send the values to a number of mac mini running flash. We built this prototype:

We were able to send some simple UDP packets but we realised that the design needed to be reviewed more. on top of this the Atmega8 doesn’t have enough space to build complex applications.

So we made this other board and we used it in a couple of client projects

Again even with 16k it’s not easy to make complex apps.

We realised that what people need is the ability to program network applications with the same ease provided by the Arduino language and we spent quite a bit of time working on this aspect but we came to the conclusion that it would be better to launch a community effort around this..

There are good ip stacks out there like uIP that could be integrated in a special version of Arduino and we could have a nice open source way to make simple networked devices.

While we get there we decided to manufacture a number of Arduino Ethernet boards with the Atmega32 processor to give us enough room to develop freely.

The other boards will be available to people who can program using the C language and we’ll provide some examples of usage.

Like the Bluetooth board this is not a beginners tool, it requires a bit of experience.

We expect to be able to make and Arduino Ethernet board that everybody can easily use very soon.

If you have a more commercial project tinker.it can provide you with ethernet boards with custom written firmware.

hi, everyone.

we fixed a few bugs and added a memory feature to this little helper application.
for who doesn’t know what it is, TinkerProxy works as a forwarder of messages coming from a serial port (for example an arduino board) to a TCP socket.
This allows you to read messages through whatever language/application supporting TCP sockets (Flash, Java, Ruby, Python etc…).

The enhancement consists enabling the application to store the latest used parameters:

• TCP port
• Serial Port
• Debug checkbox
• Add Null termination character (/0)

download, use, and please give us feedback.

thank you.