Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The littleBits Analog Arcade Machine”.
I’M paul rothman, director of r d from little bits and i’m kristen solomon, an electronics engineer at little bits. We brought to maker faire all of our modules and all of our kits we’ve got people demoing uh, all the all, the different uh modules that we have, and we have a couple of projects here as well as well as a big arcade machine that we built Especially for maker faire littlebits is a library of electronic building blocks. They snap, together with magnets and allows you to prototype electronics, create your own electronic devices really simply and easily without any knowledge of electronics. Previously, so the big project we brought is called the little bits. Arcade and it’s our biggest project that we’ve ever made with locates, it has over 600 bits and it’s a fully analog arcade game that you can play, and so it’s kind of a mixture of like clinco and pinball, where ball falls into different levels. And you want to get it towards the last tray and you win an epic win prize. The prizes that you win are the lollipops and more epic lollipops.
We’Ve also brought with us some modules um that are going to be coming out later this year. Part of our big lab program, so we have our bleep drum from bleep labs and so that’s a great complement to our synth kit and that’s basically, an electronic drum module that you can program and create your own electronic synth beats. We also have the oscilloscope module from gabotronix, and so that’s basically a full-featured oscilloscope on a littlebits module, and so you can use that to take a look at the waveforms debug, any any circuits that you’re building and it has a scope mode, a meter mode as Well, as an fft, so it’s really simple and easy to use, but it also goes really deep.
So it’s a great sort of introduction to using uh test equipment like an oscilloscope. The bitlab is a program that we launched at maker faire new york in uh 2014 and that’s a program that we have that allows our community to design their own little bits modules. So we have our hdk, which uh makes designing a module for the little bit system super easy.
We brought our animatronic hand project as well, which uses the arduino module, as well as the wireless transmitter and receivers. So you can actually play rock paper scissors with a computer and try and see if you can beat it. We also have an automatic fish feeder that uses the cloud bit.
So you can control the cloud bit on our cloud control app and feed the fish. Our our pet nemo fish here and by using the internet and the cloud kit, is our internet connected module and it’s basically a little linux computer that has a usb wi-fi dongle that you can use to commission to your wi-fi and create your own internet connected devices. So, for example, the remote pet feeder is just one project that you can make, but you can also uh create more projects than use a cloud control app or if this, then, that create automated recipes to control the cloud.
The reaction so far has been really great. We’Ve been here, i think this is our ninth maker faire and uh it’s great to just come out. We see a lot of familiar faces that come by every year, see what’s new from us and then a lot of people that are new to little bits that are just interested. So we’re happy to kind of spread the message of the power of electronics, everybody and uh, just keeping busy. You know showing people uh. What we have here, my advice to you makers is never be afraid to fail because nothing works right.
The first time, and if you just keep trying you’re bound to get it right and also don’t be afraid to try any projects, even if your ideas seem way out there, it’s always fun to just see what you can come up with and what else you can Make .